Waiting for Tomorrow

These past couple months I constantly find myself thinking about and longing for the future. I think of my future wedding and children. I think of the kind of home I want to provide, I think about the type of wife and mother I want to be. I long for the celebration that comes with all of those events. I come up with plans in my head about how this could all be possible within a few years. I feel like that's all I want. I just want to be a wife and a mother and someone that is depended on and longed for. 
But I'm eighteen. The social norm is college. You go to college when you're eighteen then you graduate, get a career then fall in love and get married and then five years after that start considering the possibility of children. 
That's another five years out for me to even begin. I don't want to wait that long, but that's what is acceptable. I struggle internally with societal norms and how I feel about my own life. 

However, none of this is going to happen tomorrow, or the next day, or the next week, or even in the next year. I know this but I wish it wasn't so.
I feel so contained by this idea that I can't even enjoy the moments I'm living in now. I feel like I'm in an eternal countdown. 

The first countdown is for my boyfriend who lives six hours away. With both of us in college this makes visiting each other incredibly difficult and somewhat painful with the short lengths of time we are able to have together. Every time we leave each other we start the painful countdown to the next time. It includes texts like "only 18 more days", "only 15 more days", "in one week I'll get to kiss you", "in 48 hours I'll be hugging you" and then back to "18 more days..". This is an incredibly hard way to live emotionally.
The other countdown is that of my life. I remember being six or seven years old and thinking "Wow! Only four more years and I'll be 10!". Ten was my magical number, until I reached age ten and started the countdown to thirteen. Then sixteen, then eighteen. Now, I have the seemingly eternal countdown. The end is no where in sight which makes it worse. It's the countdown to where I feel I will finally be able to cease the countdowns. 

When I get engaged. 

I feel like this will be an end to the countdown of when K and I will be together. It will be the end of the countdown to my life.
However, will it really? Or will I just start the countdown to kids? And then countdown to their birthdays, the countdown to their adulthood, then the countdown to their children. Before I know it, I will have counted the days to my death. 

When I think back on my life I don't want to have an endless memory of "___ days until ___"

I want to be able to live in the moment. I want to enjoy these times of my life before I do settle down and have the rest of my long life to be with the ones I love. I want to be able to go out and not constantly be wishing I was somewhere else, not only in location but in time.
My goal is to do things I wouldn't normally do. I want to have these experiences before it's too late. 

Live in the Now.

-Emily N.