lungs.

the first photo of me in college, 2006.

One day, and I'm not exactly sure when, I grew up in a real, live, functioning adult.

It happened when I wasn't even paying attention. It was a smooth transition as ever; a deep sigh one afternoon or a swift change in my step. There were no ringing bells to signal it, no flags flown or clocks reset. Somewhere, it happened -- maybe while I was burrowed deep in Mullins library typing away at a paper on feminine self-identity or during an all night read-a-thon, with my face buried between the pages of my thick Victorian prose & poetry anthology, or while I churned out a row of handmade, apartment-baked loaves of bread. I can't quite put my finger on it, but the difference is definitely there. Post-undergrad life is turning into real life. Sometime very recently, I grew up without even noticing.

I mean, I use coasters now.

There's no beginning really, just a fluid change that I realized the other day. I know how to keep my shirts from shrinking in the laundry and where to put the detergent so it doesn't leave a stain. I can fry an egg (granted, it's never quite as good as my mother's was) and make a mean breakfast sandwich. I budget. I knowingly keep and change the box of baking soda in my refrigerator. I drink and appreciate wine. I sleep with all the lights turned off because I know the scariest thing in my apartment is what I'm going to look like in the mirror the next morning. The only thing I haven't surrendered myself to is ironing. Mostly because it seems irrational and pointless (wrinkles magically disappear after three minutes in the dryer, people) and mostly because I have a habit of contracting really bad steam burns. And I always forget to buy band-aids.

I will never buy an iron. The day I buy an iron will be the day I die. Probably from a steam burn.

What is far more puzzling to me than, say, how I discovered the dryer trick or where grocery stores hide the corn tortillas (not with the bread. I know, right?), is how exactly all of this happened without my acute awareness. I've pretty much lived by myself and out on my own since I was seventeen; if I were my parents, I'd have sore fingers and toes for keeping them crossed for five years. I moved five hundred miles away from their house to live in a dorm room with three strangers who spoke in thick Southern accents, in the lone women's hall crammed between two floors of lacrosse players and fraternity brothers. I didn't know I was supposed to separate my clothing into different shades. I still wore my retainer. I was scared to drive on the highway and a little, tiny part of me believed that I would be engulfed in flames every time I pumped gas and got some on my shoes. There were moments that I didn't even think I could make it through freshman English classes and finish their five page papers, let alone survive half way through graduate school and still like books! Those early undergraduate years certainly were trying times.

I never stopped to think about how much I'd grown until this week, until I was re-teaching myself the French language and preparing for my first graduate-level conference and reading three books at once. Until I decided to tackle dinner, ganache-filled Guinness cupcakes and sewing a beach bag all in a night. Somewhere in all that craziness, I grew up into myself. The whole realization is bittersweet -- at seventeen, my parents willingly surrendered me to the world and at twenty-two, I finally grew up.


But, you know, I'm still serious about that iron.