and suddenly it's december and you're not 17 and you've never been 17 for a long time
in a gleaming and usual darkness of night, december always arrives quietly, like it's afraid to interrupt the life i've been endlessly and busy surviving. one moment, i am counting deadlines, heartbreaks, and stuffs to accomplish before the day ends. and along with it, is the strange grief of remembering. remembering who i was when time felt generous and infinite. when it felt seventeen was not a memory that keeps popping out of my photo albums, but a place i once lived in.
seventeen is an experience that comes with a rush in its hands. at seventeen, everything felt unfinished in a hopeful way. dreams were vividly alive and loud, mistakes were allowed, and the future was something i could touch without fear and doubt. at that moment, i once thought becoming older meant becoming certain. no confusions, no mixed paths—just one linear road to certainty and maturity. i thought clarity would come with my age, that by now i'd almost know exactly who am i and where this road could lead me. but then, december came across and it teaches me the opposite of what i thought. december arrives with a news that growing up is not a straight line like how i always knew—it's a series of returns to moments i thought i have outgrown.
i am older now, yes, but not necessarily braver. i carry quieter hopes, more careful love, and fears within my bones that i didn't know how to define and name back then. i've learned how to stay, how to leave, how to pretend that i am okay even if i am not. i've lost parts of myself, not all at once, but slowly in the process of small compromises i've made just to keep pushing. just to keep going and going and going.
and yet, somewhere inside of me, seventeen still exists in the ways that i feel nostalgic for things i can't fully remember. in the way december makes my chest feel heavy for no apparent reason. in the way i still wonder if i'm doing the life right. the difference now is i no longer rush to become someone else, instead i am learning how to forgive the person i've been becoming all along.
in its gentlest form, december doesn't ask me to go back. it simply asks me to look for pieces to notice. to sit with ache, the growth, the unfinished dreams that survived despite everything. i am not seventeen anymore and i haven't been seventeen for a long time, but i am still here. still learning, still becoming. and maybe that is what growing up really mirrors. that carrying all your former selves gently into the future, even when the year ends, and time keeps moving forward.
