I wish I still knew how it is to be—when you and I were still young.
To be impressionable, instead of being a cynic. To love carelessly, never mind if there were no safety nets. Skip, hop, as we draw out a hundred high-fives, even if it weren’t sunny outside. Fight like there was no tomorrow; lift up a ton of evil out of sheer optimism. How rosy things seem, and so much simpler, decades ago.
With so many years behind us, we walked roads that had been intertwined with troubles. As I have always been saying, when something is just too hard to explain, I go, “it’s part of life.” It is statement I have learned to live by, though often even I cannot immediately grasp what the fates have prepped for us lowly beings.
Why is a three-letter question word. Too simple a word yet one which you cannot answer in a straightforward manner. You need to begin figuring out how it branched out, grew untamed, a tiny brush that is now a tree line, a maze of a jungle, confusing your sense of direction. I dunno, why “why” always have to be that. Why it pulls you into a thousand directions, but grounds you with the hardest emotion of all: grief, misery, melancholy. And humans are often consumed by it—by the sadness of the answer to our whys. It is a monster that always gets the best of us.
I hate it most when it happens at night, for I am certain the darkness feeds it. Along the corners of the room, where the light don’t fall, it waits. I am not really scared of it, really, just wary. Guarded—another response mechanism I have learned later in life. So I will stare at it, then shrug it away, close my eyes and think about feeling sleepy. As someone who’s already been playing grown up for quite a while, I can shake it off soon as I wake up. It is expected of us “adults,” as we move on with life, through the grind, we sweep away the night’s nightmares and reenter the sunny world of the chirpies with a big Good Morning, as if we really mean it. A shiny coating of wide smiles to hide what is inside.
But I s’pose, you learn this and that by building up on those layers that protect you, cushion the blow—because, honey, that’s what life gives, and they don’t end, they come when you’re unawares. Lessons learned are best worn close to the skin to keep us from hurting again.
Yes, it’s probably best to think of it that way: I am a skeptic because I had seen evils, partly wide-eyed that it is happening yet deep down, are we, am I really surprised? I no longer love recklessly, not unless that person is among my tribe—people who had loved me back, who spoke the softest word, who had not forgotten. I may not hop-skip but I will still try to dole out kindness, and expect nothing in return. I am weather-beaten but I will be a sun-shiny example, in my own kind of way.
A complex maze of what we have become. Do we celebrate it? I guess so, just for the sheer size of it, the volumes of literature that are inspired by it. But the harder truth is we need to accept it. This now. Where life is not simple. That even if we bawl and pull our eyes out and sell our souls, It. Is. Never. Coming. Back. I have learned to accept that. I hope you do too, my friend. Once you do, you are welcome to bite my hard-as-stone, old-as-a-grandma’s-shoe bottom. It won’t hurt, I promise.
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Pictured: Dried flowers from B
Finally Dee 