Column: Growing up is hard to do
April 4, 2008
The sign in the driveway said “Salon,” but I thought the house would always be to me the home of one of my best childhood friends.
I hadn’t been to Malissa’s house in five years, since we enrolled in different high schools and started to lose what had been an eight-year friendship. But she and I are still on good terms, and when I heard she had opened up her own salon in her parents’ house, I was all about getting my hair cut by my former my best friend.
Except for the addition of the salon, Malissa’s house hadn’t changed at all. What had changed was Malissa.
The girl who had once been the ultimate tomboy was now your friendly neighborhood hair lady. She greeted me as warmly as ever, inquiring if I was still with my boyfriend and making the same smart-ass jokes that she had been making for the past five years.
But she had lines on her face that most 19-year-olds don’t have. The last time I had seen Malissa was October 4, 2007, the day we laid to rest the other member of our grade school “Best Friends Forever” trio and Malissa’s lifelong best friend, a good-hearted girl whose life was cut short in a motorcycle accident.
As she trimmed my hair, she related the typical salon gossip about who was dating whom, what our former classmates were doing and all of the accounts of bar fights and scandals I would ever care to know about. But she also told me stories of her hour-long daily commute from her house to her salon and her hopes that new customers would return so that she could build up her business. Most amazingly, the girl who I had always known as a huge partier seemed to be settling into a life of that was more about furthering her career than drinking beer.
She even showed me her promise ring from her boyfriend and expressed hope that she would soon upgrade to an engagement ring.
It was in this moment that I realized how little of an adult I actually am. I had been spending my spring break bitching about going back to school and the looming prospect of my first summer away from home, taking classes and working hard instead of lazing around with my friends. Truly, I have no reason to complain. While I roll out of bed to sit in a lecture class never earlier than 8 a.m., some people wake up early and drive an hour to a business that they created themselves. Where I worry about the effects of a long distance on my relationship, some people are thinking about making a long-term commitment. And while I get anxious about spending two months away from my best friends, some people have to spend the rest of their lives without them.
In the future, I’m going to try and put more value on the extra years of relative freedom that I have been given by going to college and use them to learn and work toward becoming a better and more responsible adult, not just a 20-something who thinks she’s got it hard when things don’t go exactly her way.
Though she’s got quite a head start on me, it will be a long time before Malissa or I make the transition into full-fledged adults.
All I can hope is that I make the transition as well as she has, with hopes for the future, memories from the past and, yes, some lines on my face.
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