“Suburbia” by Linn Strømsborg, published in Words Without Borders

It starts again, this feeling in the pit of my stomach, as soon as I’m alone in my old room at home: the feeling that time is standing still, that I’m the same as when I was eleven and fifteen and twenty-four. I lie on my bed, then get up and walk around a bit. I look out of the window and draw the curtains so I can’t see the windows on the other side—all the lights from kitchens, bedrooms, kids’ rooms. I open the closet and toss my bag in, shut it again. I can hear Mom and Dad talking in the living room. The sounds are so familiar, my room so small that I feel like I’m being filled up with nothingness. With that feeling you get when you think that everyone is out there experiencing things except for you, that everyone else has started living their lives for real, is going to the parties you only see in movies, kissing the boys you don’t even dare say hi to in the schoolyard. They go to bed with a smile on their face, while you lie awake and write in your diary about everything that isn’t happening. From when you start school and start seeing other people, from when you’re trading stickers with Nina in her room and dreaming of one day being just as cool and pretty as her, with just as many stickers—you long to be an adult, to be bigger, older, prettier, and cooler, you long to decide things for yourself, you long for a kind of new start, or maybe just a kickstart. You long for the life you know from late-night TV, and you believe that’s how it should be. In just six years, four years, two years it’ll all start, but then when you get there, when you’re standing there like an ordinary fifteen-year-old and you don’t look like the posters on your wall, you think you’ve failed and that you’re the only person in the world who hasn’t managed it, and you want the world to end, and you want the world to start again.

Read the full translation on Words Without Borders.