Scales of Change

There are certain times in my life where I have felt like this before.  It is not a déjà vu, it is not a likely reoccurrence.  It is something far too familiar, although never exactly the same.
It is a shedding of ones skin, a metamorphosis of unmeasurable growth.  Painful growth.  I don't know anything about snakes.  I don't know how it feels for them when their skin slowly detaches from their scales, when they slide slowly out and away from the shell that once harbored their body.  I'll never know how it feels for them, for I cannot ask.  If I ever could, I wouldn't hesitate to.
I do know, however, how it feels for me.  It is a mixture; satisfying and debliatating.  Parts of me want to grab it and rip it from me, careless of what might by lost in the process.  While the other parts of me wish to hold on, as long as possible to the skin that I came to feel so uncomfortably comfortable in.  It doesn't make sense, yet it exists still - a desire that is hard to overcome.   If I were a snake, it is almost as if I would want to pick up my shredded skin, fold it up and put it in a safe and sound place, where I could come back and visit it from time to time. To tell it that I didn't mean to shed it, that I just had to.  That, that's just the way it is.  The way it had to be.  But that is not the way it works.  Eventually, the skin degrades.  It disappears into the soil.  It vanishes from all tanigability.  How could I ever find it again?  Would I want to?
Again, this familiar feeling.  The stretching, the pulling.  Flashback to my nine year old self, sitting awake in bed; knees and ankles aching from the growth.  The bones strengthening, hardening, moving.  Teeth falling out only for new ones to break through.  First hair cuts, first scars, first sprains.  Everything so new.  And here I am, forever later on - feeling the same.  This time, nothing new.  Only similar.  Only comparative.  I've been here thousands of times but never before.  Closing my eyes wishing for relief and only finding more.  Some would scream for it all to stop, to halt, to cease and yet, I welcome it - like a nightmare that bares gifts.  Like a horror story with a happy end.

Separate thought:
My heart drops, it aches, it flows, it breaks.  I sigh, I cry, I smile and repeat.  It's as if you want the cycle to end, to come to a stable and solid conclusion - but, do you?  Do I?  The back and forth and up and down and side to side, who would I be without it?  A straight line?  A flat line?  That's sounds miserable.

My friend recently told me "27 is a game changer".  I'm not 27 just yet but I will be approaching it soon.  Before I didn't believe her.  I figured, oh, that's probably all relative - that's just your experience.  But here I am, getting closer and feeling the changes.  This game of mine, although tedious and treterous is in fact changing.  Into what?  I am not 100% sure but I am getting a pretty good idea.

Shed skin.  Shed.