She and I were getting ready to go out shopping. It wasn't a particularly meaningful exit from the apartment, rather mundane among the ones she and I have had. As I shrugged on my fleece I caught sight of myself in the mirror.
And realized a face slightly different from the one I was expecting was looking back at me. A check at my companion confirmed something I hadn't really considered--we no longer look like "kids" anymore. At least....not to me.
I know it's been something creeping up on us for a while now--a transition in attitude and appearance to adulthood. I've been resisting it a little and I can't say I'm quite ready to shake off all things we associate with youth, fun and frivolity, but it's changed.
Our concerns and conversations are changing, settling around a more mature round of questions and complaints that will --strangely--stay more consistent longer than our earlier woes: families aging and passing, the merits of home ownership, whether or not we choose to have children, the long term relationships the majority of people are going into, settling firmly into our careers or dropping everything and trying something else.
Whither our debates about Bath and Body Words and the appropriate scent for the upcoming season? (Personally, I'm going mostly citrus all the time--leaning heavily on the lemon from C.O. Bigelow--tart without being dishsoap.)
But when we went to the bar or shopping or to a meal together, here were not two very young women, finding their feet, scrambling to find their identity as independent creatures--here were established women, still young, but not with the freshest face of youth one sees on those a decade younger than ourselves--who just legally obtained that word "adult."
I knew it would happen--aging does whether we like it or not. It was just interesting to see myself change from a young post-college to a young mostly-stable adult, and realize that I project myself a different way than I did then to others.
Of course, this doesn't mean I'm stable, that we've all figured out what we want to be when we grow up or with whom we want to be or how we'll get there. The questions remain, but the face is a little different now.
