Adult

I've seen quite a few things since I moved out of home. Things that you don't expect to have to deal with, you know? You think that being an adult (whatever that means) is going to be...I don't know. Controlled, I guess. You're going to have a job and get your degree and land the perfect husband, and everything is going to be fine. I think the veneer wears off a bit the first time you run out of food, or toilet paper, and then you have to deal with some asshole landlord or a middle-management Hitler and it hits you, like, bam! This is your life, this is the only one you get, and you have to take responsibility for filling it with good things and struggling through the bad things. Good things seem to get less and less common, bad things begin to pile up, and before you know it you've got a dirty needle sticking out of your leg and you're so fucked up on acid that you can't remember exactly how it got there.
Okay, maybe I should back up a little bit.
I met a guy. Let's call him Troy. Troy was...compelling. He was everything that being an adult was supposed to be - how it was when we were kids and we dreamed about how we'd behave. He watched cartoons all day. He slept in, he skipped work, he lazed about in the sun. He also dealt a lot of drugs and spent most of his time drunk, so the fairytale image that I'm painting for you didn't exactly fly when you got below the surface. Still, I found him irresistible. That bad boy persona, you know? Even if it was completely false, it still got me hot under the collar. But I'm getting off-topic here.
Troy was holding a bit of a party to celebrate the anniversary of his grandmother's wedding vows or something like that - that was one of his little habits, holding 'parties' on any pretext so he could tank a whole bunch of people up with booze or hallucinogens and preach to them about how swell life was. After the first time, you found yourself thinking you wouldn't see him again. After the second, you found yourself agreeing with him. Things were simpler when you threw your mind at his feet. When he suggested that the girls pierce my ears, I was all for it - but all we could find was a rusted piece of crap that I became convinced was sent by the Devil himself.
I think it was at that moment, lying next to the cistern of his broken old toilet, clutching my leg just below the knee and sobbing uncontrollably to the sounds of half-hearted knocking on the splintered wood of the bathroom door, that I realized that there and then I truly was an adult. Suffering of our own making that we could not fully understand, a vast amount of sensory experience that we weren't capable of filtering, and yet my lungs kept working, my heart still pounded - and despite the fact that I was lured into a trap by an ill-conceived demagogue with vaunted notions of spiritual purity and childlike wonder, I was going to get out of there.