I do remember {almost eighteen}

when you turn seventeen, you find out all the things no one felt like telling you about, such as how different thunder sounds at three in the afternoon when all you want to do is crawl in to bed with your clothes on and sleep for the rest of time.
They fail to mention how hurt you’ll be after that stranger disappoints you, or the sense of joy you will experience be after you see that one stranger for a second time. They don’t talk about the way your head pounds whenever you think of last year or how you’d give anything to be sixteen again, or how fast forty-five minutes can go by when it’s all the time you'll have to spend with him that week.
They don’t warn you about caring so much for a venti non-fat, no-foam latte and a grande/tall coffee, and how they’ll probably forget you in five minutes when the cup is empty. They don’t list the feelings you have for that one stairwell; the people who will let you down; the different shades of pink your face will turn when someone accidentally calls him your boyfriend.
Or how much Ave Maria sounds like nails on a chalboard after you attend the third funeral in a calendar year, and how evil of a word cancer becomes. They leave out your attraction to flame and dark water; to books about dying people and movies about mummies. How a song you’ve heard a dozen times can suddenly break you, or how a YouTube personality can feel like the sister you almost had.
How a baby named Seth Titus will change your life and share the Gospel with you before he’s even a week old, and how pastors named Stephen can be deployed with a piece of your heart. How you want to read every book by Lewis simply to become his best friend; how you still wish that one stupid boy had never appeared that one night; how it’s been three years and you still miss little people named Emma and Victor; how countries like Sweden and Iceland will create a passionate desire to travel and just do things; how the name ‘love’ can carry such different connotations.
They don’t mention the desire to cut your hair off and not care what anyone thinks, or that strange, non-romantic crush you’ll always have on that one person that is just too confusing to explain to anyone
They don’t tell you that seventeen is full of thick smoke and broken, beating hearts that will always care.
Because that’s what they don’t tell you about seventeen: you remember it all. The good, the ugly, the whole lot.
They don’t tell you about seventeen.
Seventeen is never mentioned.
They don’t tell you because they don’t want to remember either.