I am in my boyfriend’s bedroom - which he will leave in 6 days - sprawled on his single bed, which is maybe the most uncomfortable bed I have ever experienced. It feels like a childhood bedroom, though it isn’t - sports paraphernalia, and baby blue bedding, framed posters and flags, and of course this bed that can’t really fit both of us comfortably. I wonder if my bedroom feels that way to him, with its pale pink accents and too many pairs of shoes. At our age, my parents were married, or nearly. But here we are at 25, still struggling to figure out how to live in adult spaces. Still arguing with Time Warner customer service reps and washing clothes in the bathtub and having sex instead of going to work on time.

Last night I slept fitfully on the greyhound bus, and now I am here, in the suburbs of Syracuse, and the sun comes through the window of my boyfriend’s soon to be empty bedroom, while he sleeps in the basement where it’s cool. I’m wearing his camel-print boxers and my never not smudged glasses and I feel about fourteen years old and it’s nice, this in between time, this moving and learning and tired twenty-something time. These days it seems like the only constant thing is the way I worry about work and he tells me it’s all going to be fine.

Tonight, we will go to a friend’s engagement party, which means we’re growing up. The party is in our tiny home town, which means we’re staying the same. Lately, we ricochet between the people we’re becoming and the people we were in high school and we talk about becoming game show hosts and children’s book authors, because that seems about as real as any imaginary future. We eat like rich children - expensive sandwiches, $9 beers, chocolate lava cake and cherry crumble and sangria by the pitcher. We traipse around New York - too giddy to be locals, too self-aware to be tourists - and I point out the places I want to come back to, and he writes them down.

Now where in the suburbs do they serve alcohol for breakfast? This is what I’d like to know, because I am not my parents, nor am I fourteen years old. And that’s fine. We’re going to be fine, right now, this weekend, in the city where we grew up, or didn’t, or dreamed about living the way we do now.