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Every once in awhile Jisung would get hit with the realization of just how young he was. Usually in the ‘I-have-my-entire-life-ahead-of-me-and-there’s-too-much-to-do’ way, sometimes in others, but often the grave realization that he had an entire life ahead of him to live just made him tired and want to uninstall the thinking function of his brain that liked to be philosophical.
“Do you ever just get hit with the sudden realization of how young you are?”
Chan froze mid-sitting at Jisung’s sudden question, lunch bag hanging in the air just above the table. Sometimes these questions came randomly and out of nowhere. They weren’t usual of Jisung (that was mostly Seungmin’s department, especially given the couple of philosophy classes he had taken for electives), but if they did come up it was usually during an anxious moment when life was just too much for his friend.
He finally gathered himself and sat down on the hard cafeteria chair, one of the many that surrounded the tables littered around the student union’s massive interior. “I dunno. Really haven’t thought about it. Why?”
“Just wondering,” Jisung said with a nonchalant shrug, taking a bite of the sandwich he was eating, scribbling something down in the notebook he had out next to his laptop.
Chan carefully observed Jisung as he settled at the table, backpack coming off his shoulders to rest beside his chair, looking for any of his usual tell-tale signs of an incoming breakdown or heightened anxiety, but unless Jisung had suddenly gotten to professional levels of hiding his emotions, there was nothing blipping on Chan’s radar.
“Everything okay, Sung?”
Jisung looked up at him and blinked, cheeks stuffed like a squirrel’s as he weighed Chan’s question. “Yeah, everything’s fine. Why do you ask?” He responded after he swallowed. Contrary to what Minho would say, he did have proper table manners.
“Your question about age was just bordering on the existential crisis side of questions.”
They’d learned long ago that not being straight-forward with Jisung when asking about certain things that threw them off (the question Jisung posed with Chan not two minutes ago being an example) usually made the situation worse. Hence Chan being direct in his approach to figure out what was going on Jisung’s brain.
“Oh. Mmm, yeah, I guess it was.” Jisung chuckled, setting down his pencil. “I’m fine, really. I was talking with a senior student the other day while waiting for coffee and when I told her how old I was, she said I was practically a baby. It just had me thinking for a minute, that was all. No existential crisis incoming, I promise.”
In a sense, it was true. The age thing. Jisung (and his roommates, Felix, Seungmin, and Hyunjin) was almost twenty, his birthday a few short weeks away. Chan himself was just shy of twenty-three, which was still young, but to the outside world might be considered old (or at least grown-up, sometimes he wasn’t sure which it was when he had to deal with the “should have graduated two years ago based on your credits and age, why are you just now finishing your bachelor’s degree” thoughts and assumptions that often came from others on occasion, sometimes himself, even though he knew the reasons why he was still “behind”). But Jisung had aged in many ways others hadn’t, ways that often made him seem older than he really was. Despite his loudness and often immature moments, he knew when it was time to be serious and hold his own, even if it was difficult and trying at times.
“Well, what do you think about it?” Chan asked, knowing full well that that question could cause an avalanche in Jisung’s mind, but still, he genuinely wanted to know. He finally looked into the lunch bag that Minho, his roommate, had so graciously packed for him and bless Minho he had packed a light lunch that Chan would be able to stomach with his heightened anxiety over an upcoming exam that was tripping him up despite his best efforts at studying for it.
Jisung wrinkled his nose. “In some ways it’s insulting to be called a baby, especially when she doesn’t know what I’ve been through or what I go through on a regular basis. Like, why do you feel the need to call someone who’s not that much younger a baby? Is it a power move or a self-confidence inducing thing that you’re older than someone?”
“I could see how that would be a possibility.” Chan cracked open the small thermos that had been housed in the lunch bag. The aroma of chicken broth and vegetables erupted from the container, the homemade soup still warm from being reheated this morning. His stomach rumbled in curiosity at the smell, and he sipped on a hesitant spoonful, pleased when his stomach didn’t flip-flop like it usually did when he was anxious like this and tried to ingest food for the sake of staying alive.
“On the flip side, it is true that by society’s standards I’m young in numbers, but two decades seems like a long time to be around.” Jisung leaned back in his chair with a frown as he continued to think about the issue at hand, pencil twisting in his fingers. “I dunno. Sometimes it feels like because I have my whole life ahead of me, there’s too many things to do or places to go see. Too much life to live, ya know? And what do you do with that? People tell you they see you doing great things, or going far, or whatever, but what if I don’t want that? What if I simply just want to exist and take this, what life is, one day at a time? Why do I have to do ‘great things’ or whatever?”
“In some ways it feels like you’re almost not enough, right?”
Jisung hummed in affirmation, still frowning. “But I feel old, Chan. Why do I feel old, like I’ve seen all there is to see?”
Chan didn’t have an answer for that one.
The sounds of the student union rose and fell around them. Fellow students clamoring and chatting with each other. Chan’s soup swirled in its thermos as he slowly worked on it, the occasional saltine cracker that Minho had also thought to pack breaking up the (very delicious, don’t get him wrong) monotonousness of the vegetables and broth. Jisung left his half-eaten sandwich untouched, still frowning at his notebook as he thought.
“I thought you said you weren’t having an existential crisis, Jisung,” Chan finally said, though his tone was amused.
Jisung’s frown broke and he smiled, a tiny giggle erupted out of him. “I didn’t think I was having one.”
They left the conversation at that. For another date, if you will. Maybe it would be brought up again at one of the dinner nights they had every other week with the rest of the gang, maybe it wouldn’t. Maybe Jisung would bother Seungmin later that night with the same question, leaving the latter up late into the morning pondering why he too felt so old, even though he was young. Maybe eventually Jisung would move on from the problem or maybe he wouldn’t, even after he got his first job out of college doing something he loved.
Who knows. Who knows.