Peter Pan Syndrome

Killy and I have taken to something that is half a game, and half quiet desperation - practising the state of being unsettled. It sounds fairly ridiculous even to me, and I'm the one for whom it's of most importance. After all, surely you are unsettled, or you aren't; what need could there be of practice?

Quite a lot, at least for someone with my particular mash of circumstances. In my opinion, settledom is not as easily definable a state as many claim. It's true that in some cases someone can tell which state 'feels right', but to say every person can immediately tell whether they're un or settled, no questions asked, is inaccurate. I know this for certain, because at fifteen years of age I was absolutely, one hundred percent certain I was settled. Three years later, and I kind of want to give that fifteen year old a sharp smack over the back of the head. There is just no way I was settled then, and my little delusion ended up proving somewhat harmful in the long run. At eighteen years old, over halfway to nineteen, I want to be unsettled.

The worst of it is I probably am. The older I get, the older I believe the settling margin to be. It's a continuing debate and I won't go into it here, but the fact of the matter is there is still a great deal left for me to experience, and my personality is likely still forming itself into the more or less stable entity it will be for my adulthood. But because I believed myself to be settled for so long, and because I was enough of a lucky bastard to actually find the form that seriously seems to be my final one, we're finding it nearly impossible to enjoy the true fluidity that unsettledom is supposed to bring. We've already found coyote, identified it as us, and held the form for nearly three years. It's so hard to change.

And yes, I mean that literally. Killy has no real incentive to change, though he does try to humour me on occasion. Not only that, but it often feels forced, awkward, incomplete. Some would say this indicates I'm settled - I say it's an indication of habit that we probably won't be able to break before true settledom finds us. Eighteen might be too young, but perhaps not by a whole lot. I already threw away the proper experience of being unsettled, and now when I'm trying to grasp at it, it's not coming.

So we practise. We make an agreement and a conscious attempt to play around with other forms. It's not exactly what you'd call successful. It still feels stilted, and the moment we let our attention drift away from the exercise - game? - he automatically reverts back to the form we're used to. We simply won't ever achieve the wistful goal of being purely unsettled, because we're not. We already know about coyote. We already have that home base.

We merely have to content ourselves with the occasional dabbling in Neverland.