This Is What Grown-Up Looks Like

So this is my life now. Three nights a week, I drive from Chapel Hill to Marcus’s apartment in Raleigh after my clinical rotations. He clears off half his tiny kitchen table (okay, three-quarters - my nursing books are huge), and we spend the evening doing the most romantic thing imaginable: homework.

This Is What Grown-Up Looks Like

He draws wireframes on napkins because he ran out of proper paper again, and I highlight every single sentence in my pharmacology textbook like my life depends on it. Which it kind of does, considering I have boards next year.

Me pretending to understand pharmacology

The glamour is overwhelming.

But here’s the weird thing - I actually love this.

Future nurse and future designer hard at work

We’ll work in comfortable silence for hours, occasionally looking up to share something funny or complain about whatever’s frustrating us. He’ll make terrible coffee (seriously working on this with him) and I’ll steal his good pens.

Our glamorous Tuesday night

It feels so… normal. Like this is what being adults together actually looks like.

I’m starting to think this is what grown-up life looks like and honestly? Not bad. Even if his kitchen table is smaller than most cutting boards and we’re both broke. There’s something perfect about building our futures in the same tiny space, even if mine involves memorizing drug interactions and his involves explaining why buttons should be blue instead of green.