#outer space 3

            “You’re just a child,” they say. “You’re only twenty.”

           “Pull it together,” they say. “You’re twenty now, you have to start functioning like an adult. When I was your age…”

           “You’re brilliant,” they say. “You’ve always been so smart.”

           “How can you be so ignorant?” they say. “You were always so smart.”

           “Kiki is my step-mom,” she says. She’s two-and-a-half and reaches for me when she’s scared.

           “You’re my love,” they say. They’ve always been my rock.

           I am in a constant state of paradox. My place in this world is convoluted and messy, no one really knows quite where to put me. My parents call me a child, something needing to be protected from the world, or at least from being a wife and mother. “You’re not ready,” they whisper to me. I am placed firmly within my mother’s grasp, struggling to be free. In the same breath, they call me an adult. They criticize my ability to maintain a household or parent, acting as if I should already know everything there is to know. Twenty is an odd age—you are simultaneously taking on the world while having no idea how to. I exist in a space that has been built for me by the words and expectations of people who don’t care enough about me. I’ve always been smart, top of my class, but when I fail out of my first semester of college, I’m suddenly sent tail-spinning into a place of “dumb,” “ignorant,” “lazy,” “unmotivated.” My place is one of contradiction.