8:06

This morning I woke up a few minutes before my husband's alarm, lied in bed for a while, tried to go back to sleep, listened to squirrels, finally read some poems I'd forgotten I'd read before, and got out of bed before 7:30, which still has 5 minutes to come. Yesterday, around this time, one of my oldest friends moved away from his home, here in North Dakota, for the first time in his life. With him he took his dog and another one of our friends.
I'm still processing the feelings I have about his departure and the fact that many of my other friends here are now thinking about, talking about, making plans to move away. Of course I'm sad, but more than that I feel something I can't really describe. It feels like nostalgia, but for the future. It feels like graduating high school.
I never thought I'd get to be an adult because the only adults I'd ever known were my parents and the parents of my friends: men and women who married as teenagers and had children before they could drink a beer in a bar, didn't celebrate themselves, barely had friends, barely had anything of their own. If you only have one model for adulthood and it doesn't fit you then how do you become an adult? What's an adult? I'm at this point, at the end of my 20's, wondering what's next when I don't want to keep doing what I've been doing, but I'm afraid of everything else there is to do.
It is now 7:55 and I still don't know what I want to say about any of this. Things are changing. Here's a poem.

Animals
by Frank O'Hara

Have you forgotten what we were like then
when we were still first rate
and the day came fat with an apple in its mouth

it's no use worrying about Time
but we did have a few tricks up our sleeves
and turned some sharp corners

the whole pasture looked like our meal
we didn't need speedometers
we could manage cocktails out of ice and water

I wouldn't want to be faster
or greener than now if you were with me O you
were the best of all my days