I feel like I´m a teenager again (I´m twenty-six years old)

The only differences are that my legs aren’t as spindly as they were back then, and I´ve been sober for almost three years. Both good things.

Recently, over the course of this summer, I´ve been hit with a wave of melancholia, the way it felt when I was fifteen years old and a sad, tumblr obsessed teenager.

I can´t really put into words why this melancholia feels different than usual. Maybe I don´t have to.

It´s the same I-feel-so-small-in-this-big-world. It´s listening to Halsey’s Badlands on a warm summer night sitting on my window in my childhood home smoking a cigarette, my feet dangling in the air. Looking at planes going by in the sky. Watching the town slowly go dark. The feeling that everything is possible because nothing is fixed yet and I have no idea who I am and what I want.

Sure, I don´t have to figure out how to get a fake ID to go clubbing and buy alcohol, and I don´t black out on a regular basis anymore. I don´t have to ask my parents for permission, and I don´t have to sneak out anymore.

Back in the day I needed to drink to be able to function at a party or the club, and now I can dance and feel free sober – I´m proud of that. I still party as much as I did ten years ago, I think I´ve always been a party girl at heart, but I don´t drink anymore.

So no, I don't actually want to be fifteen again. I don't want to be drunk again. I don't want to sneak out again. I don't want to spend hours trying to look older than I am.

But sometimes I miss the girl who was fifteen.

It´s funny because back then, I couldn´t wait to grow up, tried way too hard with make-up and alcohol to seem like someone I wasn´t, while my body begged me to stay childlike just a little longer. And now, I´m trying to find back that person I was running from back then.

I thought growing up meant becoming someone else.

At fifteen, I was scared because I didn’t know who I would become. I thought that was what being young was: having your whole life ahead of you, everything still unwritten.

But now I’m twenty-six, and I still don’t know who I’m going to become. Maybe I was wrong. Maybe nothing is ever as fixed as I thought it was.

Back then, I was sitting in my hometown dreaming about the big wide world, and the life that could be mine once I got out of this place. Now, I realized that my favorite place in the whole world is my childhood home.

And suddenly I´m sitting in the city I dreamt about back then, living the dream of teenage me while it´s nothing like I´ve imagined.

And all I want is to go home.

So I call in sick at work and hop on a train, my Mum picking me up from the train station.

I sit by the window the way I did back then listening to Halsey’s Badlands, minus the cigarette. I look through my old clothes boxed away in the basement. Some of them still fit me. I take a pair of ridiculously short Hotpants with me, and when I wear them, I feel fifteen again. It doesn´t even make any sense that they still fit, but for some reason, they do.

I sit on my windowsill and cry about someone I love. It’s almost funny. When I was fifteen, I used to sit here and cry about a person I had a one-sided crush on, convinced I was experiencing the greatest heartbreak imaginable.

This time, it’s different.

This time, I actually loved someone.

Maybe this is part of why this summer feels so much like being a teenager again. I’m going through some of the feelings I thought belonged to my teenage years for the first time.

Because there are things I haven´t experienced back then. This is my first real heartbreak. Dating and getting my heart broken weren´t part of my teenage experience. Of course I cried over my one-sided crushes, and even though it felt like heartbreak back then, I can confirm now that it´s not the same. As well as being drunk and making out with someone. I didn´t have my first sober kiss until I was twenty-three.

Maybe this is a second adolescence.

Not because I want to go back. I don't.

I want to be twenty-six and fifteen at the same time.