Feeling My Age

For the first time in my life I feel old. Its two days after my 21st birthday and the drunken haze has lifted enough for me to have my first reality check of my 21st year of life. "How do you feel?" my girlfriend asks me. "I feel old." I reply. I remember back to the time when I was ten years old and all I wanted was to be older; it makes me chuckle now to think about. I think I've shed most of the naiveté that I had coming out of high school almost three years ago. From those last few days of high school, to this point in my life, I have experienced more things than I ever thought possible in a three year span. I look around now at many of the friends I've met here, and it is amazing to me how far I've come since I was their age. It's hard for me not to forget the gap that exists between me and almost all of my classmates. To them that gap doesn't seem like a big one yet, but they will soon find out how enormous it really is. It's not just the fact that I can go to bars and clubs and they can't. The fact is, the two years I took off from high school were the most eventful years of my life. …