Number. Adventure. Blank Paper.

Looking at property listings is as sobering as, well, as a hobo having run out of alcohol under a sobbing evening sky.

Not that I’m planning to add a house to my current list of assets soon (my laptop, childhood bolster and Pratchett collection don’t take too kindly to newcomers. Especially those that cost more than them). Not that I can.

It was probably a bout of adulthood hitting me between the eyes, because I sure as heck felt the slam when the living daylight left me. Those prices had so many zeroes that I was pretty sure it’s a health code violation in several countries, and a stigma in at least one.

But it was something perfectly sensible to do, wasn’t it? In another 4 months or so, I would be 25 years old. Doesn’t matter that my 14-year-old inner self is writing angsty songs about it. Doesn’t matter that I have no idea how to be 25. Doesn’t matter if I think 25 is but a number, except that with this one we get cake, which is definitely more than what you can ask of, say, 3.14159265.

I would be 25. And still making it up as I go along.

And one of the things I managed to make up was perfectly adulty things like looking through property listings. And feel depressed. And complain about feeling depressed. And drive people insane by repeating myself, in this case, one “and” at a time.

I also started thinking in timelines again. You know, that unwritten decree that you must be married by this age, and get a promotion by that age, and pop a baby out by some other age, etcetera. Not that there is anything wrong with thinking like that. It got some people somewhere – family, career, a nice house, a shiny car, mid-life crisis… hey, it’s not my kind of life, but heck, my life probably involve a telephone-booth sized apartment and irregular meals, so it may not be to your taste either. We’d both be even, in a way – although you’d be richly smooth, while I’m merely spread thin.

What bothers me is that this was precisely the kind of mentality that I vowed not to fall into. I do not want to live my life by a schedule that was chiselled into the psyche by culture and customs. This is not to say that I’m against marriage, or promotion, or procreation. In fact, these are all things that I would celebrate with fanfare and noisemakers and a costume party for at least one of them. But if these happen to me, I want it to be meaningful, not merely punctual.

Thinking in timeline felt like a grid pressed into my mind, grating it into a colony of work ants with only one obsessive purpose; one Queen to feed. And the Queen breeds. She breeds more sterile, wingless slaves. And she doesn’t care who dies.

One of my biggest fears is that one day, when I look in the mirror, I would see the zombie in my eyes. A zombie that wants no brains, because it knows not what to do with them. A zombie who forgot how to be hungry.

Is that what adulthood looks like? Are the grids finally clamping down? Will it all be a wingless, barren chase for survival from here, for the fulfilment of a fertile future?

Is it the right thing to do?

Perhaps. But not this year. 25 can be just another number, another adventure, another blank paper.

And if I toss the damn watch into the lake, 25 can be the best.

We make it up as we go along.