The Underneath

Am I meant to be waiting for something to happen?

Will it?

(a beat. realisation)

I’m officially eighteen. Yay…

It doesn’t feel very different. A year older but with a shit-tonne more responsibility. Here we go. The road to 30.

I’ve got it all figured out. I’m old enough to map out the life I’ll have to live, based on how my family treats my older cousins.

Turn eighteen: huge party. Or maybe not, ‘cause you either do an eighteenth, or a twenty-first. Not both, according to my mum. But all my Italian family got both and they’re like a fever dream before the fucking fever dream begins.

Eighteenth, then the aftermath. You can be stupid until you’re 21. Then it’s like, you’re an actual fucking adult, go and do adult things now. Get your life together. You’ve drunk, you’ve partied, you’ve got your licence.

If you’re not in Uni, if you haven’t done something useful by 21, you’re already off to a bad start. That’s one strike.

Twenty-first: you get another party, another round of presents, and another speech from your dad saying how fast you’ve grown up. But there’s nothing that officially snaps you out of it. They have to push you out. Now shit gets real.

They don’t care, anymore. They don’t care what you do or where you go, as long as it’s “you’re doing something with your life.” And it has to be interesting; to them.

If you’ve got a girlfriend, if you got that work placement, if you actually have a direction.

And then you’re twenty nine, and it’s all blurry. You think about turning eighteen and you’re in cold water, doing the ice-bucket challenge.

Except the water came from nowhere, and you didn’t realise that it was summer. But now the ice spreads when it hits the grass, and it’s colder and colder than you remember.

So are their eyes.

You don’t know where you’re going, and you’re feeling like you’re actually treading water, not in a heated pool in a resort in Italy, but the ocean.

There’s waves, and this world is unforgiving.

It’s astounding to me how it changes. I don’t know how I know, I know already that it’s begun, the games and the trials and the three-strike policy, the determination of your worth, the worth of everything you’ve worked for, your dreams, the feelings of your inner child and everything you’ve let shape you as who you are…

They tally if it’s good enough.

They tally it up, and if there’s a single cent missing, you’re struck.

Three lives, they whisper.

Inevitably, by your thirties, if you aren’t planning for grandchildren, or have at least figured out who you love or what you want…

Forget it.

Forget Christmas, your nieces and nephews, the cousins much older now and all with their fancy new jobs and briefcases.

Forget your Dad giving you his car, forget winning the lottery.

You’re fighting whirlpools and cyclones. And guess what. There’s sharks too.

‘Coz on the underneath, in the inside, you feel yourself chained up. It wraps around your ankles and makes the effort more tiring, but you had worked it out. Since your eighteenth birthday, you had worked it out and dealt with it.

But something underneath you pulls it tight. And down, down, down, the winches turn.

Don’t bother shutting your eyes or hating on the cold. It’s inevitable, you should’ve known.

Didn’t get there fast enough. Mumma wanted a granddaughter.

Didn’t sing loud enough. Now the piano’s on the street, and unless you want them to watch you fix the rickety old piano that you always loved, you had better get your shit together, get your life together before you sink. They won’t get you. There’s no lifeboat. There’s no flares. There’s no reason to stop them from watching you - how dare you think that there’s another way out. You’re the reason the ship sunk, you can’t cry out.

It’s not fair that at eighteen years old, I sign the contract with the glow-in-the-dark ink of a dead squid. Or else I might do something that feels right to me.

~