Farewell to Seventeen | Previous Challenge Entry

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TITLE: Farewell to Seventeen | Previous Challenge Entry
By Edy T Johnson
05/21/19
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My wind-up alarm clock sat next to the lamp on my dresser. The hands pointed to just past 11:30 p.m. I lay on my bed, writing, glancing up to see the minute hand had crept a bit closer to joining the hour hand. Even though it was inevitable that I couldn't make time stand still, I simply dreaded the approaching midnight hour.

Back then, I'd never had one of those "Five Year" diaries I'd seen for sale. Instead, I liked using a spiral-bound eight and a half by eleven inch sized notebook with lines and brown covers, my companion for gathering my teenage thoughts, poems, and overflowings of my heart. Tonight's entry would be especially treasured. I titled the page "Farewell to Seventeen."

How I had loved the thought of being seventeen, a favorite, beautiful number! It was the perfect age and I wanted to hang on to it forever. I didn't want tomorrow to bring me my 18th birthday. I'd have to accept that I was no longer seventeen. I wept at the thought.

Eighteen sounded old, by comparison, the beginning of maturity. I wasn't ready. Seventeen was like the full blossom the childhood years had been working to open, bright, fragrant, beautiful, and full of joyful purpose. No longer a child, yet not yet pushed into adulthood with all its demands and responsibilities. If only a person could live in such a limbo, like a butterfly in a sunny garden, just enjoying life in all its glory. It would have been...almost like Heaven.

I continued writing, about wilting flowers turning brown around the edges, petals dropping like lazy snowflakes carried gently by a warm breeze to the earth. More I wrote, pouring out my heart, until both hands on the clock face joined, uplifted as if in a prayer. Too late, seventeen was over. The new day began. No point dwelling on it further. Out with the light, covers pulled up to my face, I let the tears console me until I fell asleep.

Rather by default, I refused to welcome my eighteenth birthday.

If I’d known, then, what adventures lay ahead, the unfolding plot of the story the Author of the universe was writing for me, I’d have changed my tune from regret to joyful anticipation. Oh, how many of those spiral-bound diaries now hold volumes full of ageless pages!

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