PART 52

I’ve been thinking a lot about the stage of childhood in a person’s life. How volatile it is to the child. How distant a teenager feels from it. How mysterious it is to the old. It’s intangible and heartbreaking to almost anyone who isn’t in the midst of it. When you think back to your childhood self… doesn’t your chest tighten just slightly? Is that the feeling of missing yourself? Can you miss yourself? (repeat that 20 times in the mirror stoned)

Can you remember a time when your brain wasn’t fully formed? Was there freedom in that? Like a home owner continuously adding rooms to his house. Like a spelunker finding more and more cavernous rooms deeper and deeper into the Earth. Or was it a struggle to feel emotionally balanced and a daily horror knowing your body is growing and your talents are forming and your personality is beginning to fill out and take a monstrous shape? Were we all a petri dish of unfortunate opportunities? Was everyday a life altering event? Is adulthood just children trying to live with the post traumatic stress that comes with your body’s growth ending?

Do you ever see a kid walk by and wonder if they will end up on anti depressants? Or see them working night shifts? Or imagine them coming home broken from a war? Or that they will intentionally hurt someone that depends on them? Or see them hating people groups because of their religion? Or pretend they’ll grow manic and fall into OCD tendencies? Or see them end up falling into a loveless marriage? Or wonder if they’ll do too many drugs and move to an isolated part of the country because they just can’t stand the idea of interacting with another human again?

Ya, me either.

It’s a lonesome world away from the endless possibilities that youth carries. The longer I survive the more I see my emotional feet become set in the concrete of myself. I think that’s where the cultural obsession with youth begins… in the desire to have options on the final version of yourself. We want to bottle it and sell the freedom to lose responsibility and matured sadness.

We want to lose the knowledge of what is beyond the horizon.

Run free you children of the rotating Earth. Celebrate your matted hair and red cheeks while infinite universes violently collide and atoms tear screaming through fields of dark matter. Cry when the sun is too bright. Wail when the water is too cold. Draw with sticks in the sand like the ancients before you. Imagine buildings as people. Forget pain swiftly and love with every inch of your growing brain and beating heart. Run as fast as you can until your legs give out and you fall into the puddle of knowledge and maturity and the rest of your life. Rise and dust yourself off. You’re beyond the horizon.