“Life Skills For Please Not Me”

by Aidan Kuemmerle

Over the break, my aunt gave me a book called Life Skills For Teens. A book full of useful skills and facts about being an adult, it also has guides on navigating everyday tasks that people would usually just pick up by trial and error. When I first got it, I was happy because now I had something that I could use if I didn’t want to or couldn’t ask for help. I flipped through the book, thinking more about my morning than the pages. I remembered how I woke up later than usual and how it didn't really matter. I remembered what I had for breakfast, I went over what I wondered what we were doing today; then wondered if I might be wrong. 

I kept flipping through the book, thinking about my morning, taking in all the family and togetherness I had around me. I got to the end of the book so I flipped through its index to see if it made a different sound that way, and I wondered about what kind of adventure in the redwoods I would have today. I wondered if I would jump through the hollowness of an old tree’s bark that wouldn’t crumble. Images of me running under fallen trees and finding branches to climb dazzled in my head. There were more images of me with the book, holding a banana in one hand and the book in another; checking the ripening meter it had nestled in its pages. I wondered if tonight was the night that I was going to write more of my story because that was the whole reason I put myself through that horrifying TSA line. I wondered that today might be the day that I got to try the elusive In-N-Out burger my cousin had been rambling on about the whole drive home the day before. Then I stopped flipping the pages trying to make them go as fast as they could to hear the sound change, by chance, and it opened onto a page about shaving your face. I put the book down.

I looked up, and my mood shifted, now dwelling in a cave of unplaced anger and fear over something I couldn’t place. I saw my aunt squabbling to find things, but when I walked over to the kitchen to ask if I could help, she gave me a stare of doom and told me to be anywhere else. I misplaced my anger from the book, which left a different emotion in its place. It made my skin crawl and my stomach turn over. It didn’t give me the pricks of anxiety, but it had the same cloud. My attention was pulled by two forces, one that made problems and one that fixed them, both I pushed away. I thought about my family and how, when I turned 18, I would miss them. I thought about how I had never been away from my family when we're all together for more then a week, and how I've never been away from at least one of my family members for more than three days. I thought about everything that the book stood for: independence, good decisions, responsibility. In my head, it sounded more like loneliness, boredom, and stress. I thought about how you can do so much more as a kid. I thought about how I had never seen an adult play pretend with other adults and treat it as a game. I thought about how whenever I looked away from my aunt, she never smiled. I thought about how my cousin talked about how she had to choose between food or gas. I thought about my friends being taken advantage of by their bosses. Then I found my anger. I stomped my feet through the stairs until I reached my bed that lay on the floor, and threw the book onto the bed and glared at it. One year; that's all I have left to experience my childhood. Leaving my house, leaving my siblings, leaving my friends, leaving the hot meals, leaving the knowledge that I could get home and take a rest, leaving the backyard,  leaving my bed, leaving my dog, leaving my leopard gecko, leaving the forest, leaving the lake, leaving the tree house, leaving the woodworking shed, leaving my parents, just so much leaving. There's a meeting too, but that's less difficult in a more difficult way, and I finally knew what the book meant, it meant growing up, and now I didn't even want to touch it.

I’ve heard people call this Peter Pan syndrome, which is ironic considering the play I’m in this semester. When I was little, I thought about this too, but I had so much time, it's not like it went by any faster than I thought it would have gone by, now I’m just sitting here wondering why I couldn’t have any more time. Why not, why can’t I have been one of the lost boys, I would be so good at it. Running around letting your imagination do anything it pleases, fighting pirates, flying! When I was young, I liked to think that I would have been Peter Pan’s right-hand man and Hook left one. (hehe). I was so shy around people, but when I played games with my friends, I wasn't. I was Peter, I was a warrior, a high school student, a lost boy, a demi-god, a Jedi, I always went by the name Peter. I chose to pursue writing when I was little because as much as I begrudged it, I knew 18 would come. I think that growing up meant always being shy, quiet, my overly apologetic self. I could still create people I could live through that were daring and had comebacks. I could create places and monsters that I could still defeat, even if it were by myself, and even if there were problems outside my world that I couldn’t imagine fighting. 

When I saw that book, it made me think about the possibility of not being able to create worlds and being forced into a shy and careful box, tip-toeing around conversations and trying not to upset anyone even when they did something wrong. It was the antithesis of everything I’ve ever wanted to do. That's when I placed that feeling, as I stared at the book, my glare getting pushed away by my mom touching my shoulder and telling me it was time to go to look at a collage. It was despair. In that moment, I swore, I swore an oath that I remembered that I had said when I was younger, and I will when I’m older. “I will never grow up.”