19

I remember being 19.

It’s that age when you’re 100% an adult and no one on earth is going to stop you doing cool adult things like drinking litres of vodka, renting your own place (with five other people), driving fast, clubbing, drugging and generally grabbing life by the horns and swinging it around your head like a Warrior Princess. Somehow the fact that you have no savings, no assets, no qualifications and are barely scraping in $400 a week doesn’t throw a dampener on your lust for life, lust for experience and lust for the opposite sex (or same sex, depending on what town you grew up in). You’re answerable to no one, the world is one giant buffet and your whole being buzzes with premonitions of the fantastic shit you’re going to do with your life. And on top of that, you know EVERYTHING. Not the EVERYTHING you know when you turn 14 and realise your parents are stupid and the world hates you, but the EVERYTHING that adults know, because now you’re an adult too and are out in the real world you know what’s what, a’ight.

Last week, right outside my workplace, a 19 year old drove his Commodore into a tree no larger than my thigh, with enough force to tear the vehicle clean in half and pitch his body 50 metres down the road. No doubt he also left a huge trail of emotional wreckage after the event. I don’t ever want to be the mother who answers the phone at 1 am to that kind of news.  

I’m quite sure most 19 year olds come within a hair’s breadth of hurtling into a tree, and it’s only sheer luck and God’s sense of humour that lets them through to the other side. Because even while knowing EVERYTHING, they consistently mangle themselves in vehicles, over dose on every substance imaginable, get murdered while backpacking in foreign lands, fall off motorbikes, misjudge drunken knife fights and commit suicide with alarming regularity.

So to that 19 year old boy, who chose to terminate his life with such abruptness, indignity and heart-wrenching needlessness – every day I will drive past your plaque on the highway, and even when the masses of floral tributes and soft toys wither away, I’ll doubtless think of the other 19 year olds who never quite made it across to this beautiful place with the rest of us.