He wasn’t talking about me leaving to go back home. I was home. Or rather, I was in their home, having moved back into my parents’ house about a year before. He was really asking when I planned on getting my life together. And it’s not that I didn’t agree with him, it’s just that I didn’t feel quite ready to give up my life of leisure, at least not yet.

It’s not like I didn’t watch my high school and college friends fall into line, one by one. As they became more stable, settling into lives that seemed plucked from the pages of an Ikea catalog, I strangely found myself regressing, exploring things that most people got out of their system when they graduated high school. As my friends hung works of art in their freshly painted foyers, I tacked up Michael J. Fox posters on my bedroom wall. As they set up savings accounts and monthly budgets in Excel spreadsheets, I dipped into my paltry funds for beer money. We looked at each other like we were different species and in a way we were: They were Homo sapiens maturus and I was Homo sapiens immaturus. If we mated, we’d probably start a whole new breed of human being.

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