November 3 – Day 47

Tonight I was a grown up. For the first time in 47 days (perhaps much longer) I got to be an adult. I have been desperately craving the company of people who are old enough to remember the Gulf War, New Kids on the Block or the importance of Saved by the Bell to an adolescent mind. Five years never seemed like much before but somewhere along the way I realized that I was a college freshman when most of these kids were in middle school and the gap has since seemed insurmountable. A few days ago on my lovely stroll through northern Moscow I met a young British man named Nathaniel at a coffee shop and shared a fantastic conversation while waiting not to be served. We decided to meet up tonight for drinks and I am a little embarrassed to admit how out of my element I felt. First of all it has been a good long while since I have been on a date and even longer since I have had the kind of formal, thoughtful date I had tonight. I felt like at any minute I might get ushered away by the management and sent out to find the kiddy table. Nathaniel is a brilliant young lawyer from London who just relocated to Moscow to work at the largest corporate law firm in the world. He took me to an incredibly chi-chi club on Tverskaiya near his flat were we sipped decadent mojitos and sparkling water and discussed life and art and political correctness. He told me about the year he spent volunteering at an orphanage in Africa and how he took two years off university to build a house in New Zealand with his bare hands. Somehow we bypassed all the idle chit-chat that normally accompanies get-to-know you evenings and went straight to the real stuff. Somewhere in the midst of his insightful soliloquy about the unacceptable objectification of women in Russia, I started to feel like it was all way too much and for a split second I felt far closer to the twenty-year olds I live with than the thirty year old sitting across from me. It was, however a beautiful evening and we migrated from on lovely club to the next in the falling snow in an attempt to escape the smothering cloud of smoke that is an unavoidable presence in Russian establishments. We were just leaving the second lounge on our way to the Ritz-Carlton bar, to hear the ‘swanky’ (it sounds far less pretentious when said with an accent) string quartet that plays there in the evenings when I realized the time. It was 12:45 pm and I had to tell my incredibly generous date that I had to go back to my DORM because I had CURFEW. He was horrified and I was humiliated. I have never had a curfew in my life and even at twenty-five I felt more like twelve. The trip home was rather quiet with the exception of his musings on how he had never walked a ‘girl’ to a dormitory before, and it only became more uncomfortable with the incessant phone calls from the guys I live with who were going ballistic because I wasn’t home yet. My cheeks are still red just thinking about it. All in all it was a very nice way to spend an evening but it made me see how far I am from that place in my life. It was all too much, to perfect, to polite and part of me spent the entire night laughing at how ridiculous I felt in the situation, like when you try out your mom’s clothes for the first time or try to sneak into a bar when you are clearly only steps past puberty. On a certain level, I have spent the last few week worrying that I have regressed, become more and more emotionally immature and losing touch with my adult reality but after tonight I am starting to see with new appreciation the effect of my younger classmates. I have spent my entire life in a rush, bolting towards the next phase rather than enjoying the here and now. I am twenty-five and while that is no longer nineteen it isn’t yet thirty and I think it is okay to just want to enjoy the fun for a while. I am twenty-five. I have no plan for the future. I have no idea what is next. I have no concrete place I want to call home. But for the first time in twenty-five years that is alright. I am happy. I like my life. And I am really really enjoying the here and now.