We are all adapting ourselves

Darwin have already said that the best kind of life are those who survive in this world where liquid water becomes gas, night becomes day, seed becomes plant and fire turns to ashes. Looking at it from this perspective, it’s easy to see that things change all the time and very fast. It is so with nature, it is so with the situations of life and it is so with ourselves.
We are all adapting. At all times, 24 hours a day.
But of course, nothing can be that simple. Life is not like an easy adaptation of fire and water — we are complicated and broken people, we get in trouble many times and change is something that scares people.
Change scares me. No one learns to face change, only learns to face the change that is already underway in their life. To change means to leave behind the old way, the certainties so certain … It is to face nothing, and have to start over.
I’ve been carrying a strange feeling in my chest. It’s almost a hole, like a pipe leaking water. I can hear the drips between one word and another. Somehow a little suspicious, I know he was cloistered in me all the time and I have no idea how to stop the leak before it floods. I wish I had the certainties of before.
Entering high school marked me a lot. Not seeing elementary school II at the top of the tests scared me a little, and I have to pronounce the words “high school” every time someone asks what year I’m in school. That was it: change. I was no longer a 14-year-old girl, but a teenager, full of complicated emotions and the certainties left behind, desperately trying to rediscover them. This, I believe, is called “growing up.”
Ah, growing up… The best known change in the world. It is also the most difficult to accept at any given time in the transition, when it is not yet clear what awaits you. There are a lot of people who ask you to grow up, but nobody tells you how.
But now, can I say it? No one has to tell you about this. This is one of those super-important things that we have to find out for ourselves, on our own, getting stoned from life in the head and some warnings from time to time.
“That’s how it works: you grow up and the space in your chest, too.”
“But that emptiness bothers me.”
“And who doesn’t bother about that?”
We worry until we decide what is best to do with this new space available. And, oh, when you find out … It’s liberating. It is starting the new start, getting out of square one and feeling ready to run the marathon. When you finish running, a new beginning is waiting for you.             And it starts all over again until you figure out once again how to relearn how to run.
It’s 10 pm, the sky is already dark and I’m at my window, watching as everyone comes and goes all the time, adapting eternally to changes they can’t choose. There are times when the world stops. Others, it goes out in a rush. I think the important thing is to always try to get somewhere, no matter if you know where it is or not.
Now, I anxiously wait for my heart to clash with my head once more, contesting yet another change. They scream, cry and in the end they get along.

They were right.

Ana Laura Marins