Little Miss Quit

I do believe in fairies

Do you see it? Yes! You’re flying! Now substitute the squash for spiked punch and you will more or less find yourself in the non-too-distant present that is the final weeks of summer term, third year. This is where I live at the precise moment, floating along on a carefree breeze of glitter and a lack of responsibility. Soon however, all too soon, I will be thrust out into the cold, ominous wasteland known as ‘adult life’.

If one goes by the book of Corinthians, with ‘if’ being the operative word, then supposedly the time has nearly come for my fellow soon-to-be graduates and I to put aside such childish things; to drop our glow sticks and plastic cups of fairyjuice and morph into fully-fledged, dependably sophisticated members of the University of Life.

As time ticks away, however, I find my philosophy increasingly following in the colourful and wondrous lines of Dr. Seuss and his belief that us ‘adults’ (as we are forced to call ourselves) are really just ‘obsolete children’. Curiously, like Benjamin Button, it seems the older I get the younger I feel, act, and sometimes if I’m really lucky, look.

Despite my best efforts to emerge from my snug little chrysalis into the supposedly grown-up new being that I should by now have become, the ghost of youthful past refuses to be exorcised.

I remember the exact second, early on this week, that I realised my quit was a born failure. It was a warm day and the BBQ was blazing. Having fancy-dressed myself up as an artist (coincidentally, the profession my childhood self most desperately wished to be when she grew up. Instead she became an art historian. * Inner child sighs *), my limbs were covered in paint and my bum was wet. Sat giggling uncontrollably amidst a paddling pool I had just drunkenly slipped over in, having dragged my poor Brownie-uniform clad friend down with me, I could have been eight again.

Never allowed near alcohol as a nipper, despite the occasional sip of shandy if I had been especially good or if my sister had made me cry by cutting all the hair off my favourite Barbie (which I still haven’t fully forgiven her for), the intensely mingled feeling of embarrassed shame and heady silliness that only childhood experience can facilitate flooded my every twenty-two-year-old cell. And it had scant little to do with the gin.

Ever since that moment it’s been hard, nay impossible, to control. (Or, admittedly, to live down.) Mostly I think because of how exhilarating such childlike frivolity is. There is so much pressure to be mature, polite and ‘civilised’ in most everyday ‘grown-up’ situations that the sheer relief of slipping up into insensibility verges on liberation. Even if it is within the gap of a very few seconds – a moment of mini-freedom, to me, is worth more than all those years of responsible decorum.

Now that I think about it, if I compare the me of now with the me of a few years back, it would indeed seem as if my aging has reversed. Back then I seemingly had it all planned out; the long-term relationship, the life goals that would see me live the dream, the unshakable sense that I knew everything worth knowing and could do anything I wanted.

These days the outlook is drastically different, far less set out, far less definite and inflexible. I’m much happier to take each day as it comes, to concentrate on forming my life now, not on the exact form it may eventually take. And I don’t think that’s childish, or even particularly child-like. It’s more than that.

Sometimes wisdom comes in unobvious guises. Despite how I may act, speak, or (fancy) dress, I truly know that I have learnt a lot over my three years scouring this mysterious studentland of arrested development between child and adulthood. So this time I may have fallen into the paddling pool that a sage person would have avoided, but no one ever got wise without experience. Bruises are to be had, no matter how ripe one tries to be.

For when the time comes that our cuts and scrapes can’t be healed by a shiny plaster and a lollipop, then we truly need that wet slip to remind us of where we packed away the resilience and freedom of our childhood days. And I’ll bet you a bag of pick’n’mix that they’ll be right there under the bed, along with our young fears, hopes, and dreams.

Is that a crocodile I hear, or the tick-tick-tock of my own regressive footsteps....? So long as there's cocktail sausages and a ball pool, who cares?

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