This is the third installment of a guest blogging series by Shawna Stoltzfoos. Read her first and second entries here.

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It happened almost overnight. It took years. It was quick. It was eternal. It happened. It didn’t happen. It never stopped happening. It happened once but I forgot. It might happen.

When I was a child, I reasoned as a child. I picked out Blockbuster videos as a child. I stirred up shit at the local dive bar like a child. I ate grapes like a little asshole, complaining about the seeds and the peel and the color and the stem.

I grew older, and I grew older. I refined. I shut up about food and ate it. My feet drug along the concrete a little, smacked against the concrete a little.

Then I got younger again. The world is scary. I got a minor diagnosis and wept. I was told I was not talented and wept. I lost social battles and wept. The world is scary. I was seven again, and lost, and afraid, and always calling my mother.

I moved to Brooklyn the other day. I’ve made a list of all the reasons. When I’m old, they make me feel proud and brave. When I’m young, they make me sob with ineptitude. I call my mother.

Reason one: Because I wanted to. Proud, brave. Sob, inept.

I moved out of my minuscule apartment in Lancaster City, feeling young and scared, three feet tall, holding tight to the side seam of my mother’s jeans. I ripped my last name off the mailbox, and underneath, the name Harriet Beiler. My character in my indie mini-series that we filmed at my place. I feel old. Wise. Proud. Accomplished.

Time is an energetic old man who dances on your grave in a coconut bra.

I think about that poem ‘Courage’ by Anne Sexton. I think about the day when I will put on my carpet slippers and stride out. On days when I feel very old, I can almost feel them on my toes. When I’m young, I sit in the fetal position and stare at the slippers from across the room, murmuring to myself in code. Affirmations, I guess they’re called.

Young, or old, but rarely in between. Which is what I actually am. The first thing I put out in my Brooklyn apartment is a figurine of a young girl that my great-great-grandmother gave to me, before she died at 108 years old. I put it up high in my bedroom, so I can greet it with my chin in the air, boldly. The women in my family live a long time. I stick my arrogant face up to God and grin.

Lancaster was a fantastic place to be born, a fantastic place to have left as a young child, a fantastic place to have returned to as a young adult. I hold it in my jacket pocket like a shiny rock. “Stoltzfoos,” I say now like a stranger. New Yorkers look right through me. They don’t know about it.

I was sick for a month before I left. There was going to be a big party. I was going to tell everyone in town and let them hug me. Then I became very ill, and the party was cancelled before it was announced. I went unhugged, and quietly left, a real Irish exit. French exit? A real universally preferred exit. Everybody was left off the hook. I bowed out.

I’m young and I miss the library on Duke Street. I’m old and I miss the rainbow cakes on Duke Street. I’m young and I miss the man in the cowboy hat. I’m old and I miss the woman who was mean to me once. I’m still ill. I lay on my Brooklyn couch now. It’s all idiotic.

The old man in the coconut bra shakes his hips.

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Shawna Stoltzfoos is a writer, actor, and filmmaker, and the creator of the mini-series Young/Lancaster.