Suddenly you’re nineteen years old and staring down the double barrel of a shotgun loaded with expectations. You can get your tongue around the word ‘résumé’ but it tastes bitter: you cut your teeth on words you found in SAT prep books, they slice your gums open at night, while you’re still awake, staring at glow-in-the-dark stars you pasted in a messy galaxy on your ceiling, age seven; now you wish on them. You wish that you won’t wake up terrified in the morning, and you wish that you could stop wishing to not wake up. Your childhood bedroom feels like an animal enclosure, claustrophobically small and too familiar to leave, but full of time that’s been wasted, stacked neatly on the shelves. Suddenly you’re a legal adult, and there are two things you know for certain: you can buy cigarettes and lottery tickets, and that you know nothing. Suddenly you’re almost twenty and you’ve lived your life wrong. Surely, you’ve lived your life wrong: you have no significant other, no published novels, no Porsche, you can’t make coffee for shit and everyone you know has figured out how to make it look like they’ve gathered their lives into a semblance of order, while you sit in class and wonder if this is the right decision, how badly it will hurt when the world collapses inside your chest if it isn’t, even if it is. You wonder if the debt will balance your parents’ expectations or if failure is inevitable: if you will disappoint regardless, if it will anchor you to a nine-to-five and chain you to a life of unsurity. If you will be forced to watch, throat bared, while others leave the ground and you barely have room to stretch; if you’ll never grow because you can’t find the sun, because you don’t know where to look for it, because the world got you lost. Suddenly you’re a child playing dress-up in an adult’s skin, and you have to convince yourself you’ve already got the map. Somewhere, someone you know is connected by thread to your smallest finger: someone who will help you breathe because they don’t need to wait for you to ask for help. Someday, you will realize you are not alone, will tug the thread, will start walking. You’ll find out where you’re going on the way.