Roots, Fruits, Cahoots

I'm living in the awkward in-between.

It has become painfully clear that I'm neither adult nor child. And with that made all but clear, I've realized that a certain freedom arises from this ambiguity. I can vote and smoke and play the lotto, but I can't seem to find a big boy job. I'm not getting married or having kids, but I've got a college degree to show that I'm not a baby anymore. I pay rent but not a mortgage. I have a dog.

I feel like one of those air plants that just exists by sucking nutrients out of the air. It's not a bad existence, per se, but it is also not a substantial one. It's a novelty. There is no fruit, there is no shade. It's because there are no real roots.

In the past four or five years, it seems that I've done a really good job at almost severing all of my roots. I don't really talk to my best friends from high school, and they are married. My college friends have begun the process of moving away or drifting away or getting distracted with the real world. It's a sad way that things go, really, but it also seems to be the natural order of things.

And so it is, I suppose, that my spiritual roots have been pruned. Not in an angry or malicious way. But in a way that is part, I think, or the maturation process. I don't know what I'm looking for, or if it is really there to be found. But I'm hopeful. I was talking to a friend several weeks ago, and she described herself as a hopeful agnostic. I don't know if I want to go that far, or if maybe I'm afraid of labels. But I understand in a very clear way what she meant.

I don't know. I don't know if I can know. But I sure hope.

T