19931025
As my friends grow older, their maturation brings strong feelings of nostalgia, a reminiscence of the reckless, now abandoned days of youth.
No longer do we smash windows and vandalize, no more late night excursions for gain, no sailing from tree to tree while we hid from the adult world.
Now we are adults, all in body, and more each day in spirit. Our dreams of immortal youth have been traded in, like some comfortable used car that we're now embarrassed to be seen in, traded for the fashionable model called responsibility. Once we were so proud of who we were, our conviction, our uniqueness. We faced the trials of adolescence with the bearing of a holistic crusader, sure that our tribulations were the plotting of a malicious society out to suppress our voices and our clarity of vision. As adults, our vision insists that such ideas and idealists are foolish, but they'll probably outgrow it, after all, we did.
Dreams of responsibility fill a cold void where once our dreams of beating the system flared bright. We look at the Big Machine and plot how we can place this cog among endless other cogs to our best advantage.
Though it pains me to do so, take notice of my usage of the word "we", for I too have begun my fall from the wishfulness of youth to the wistfulness of adulthood. Oh, how it pains me, for I am still a dreamer at heart, and so my heart takes up arms to do battle against my mind with its drive toward practicality. The ensuing clamor fills me with such discord that neither side has room for advancement, leaving me hamstrung in stagnant indecision.
Going nowhere gives me little to live upon, but if I trade in my dreams because they're no longer convenient, then somewhere down the road I'll discard my past as some fanciful fantasy.
What a cruel choice, to be forced between survival and idealism, but it is a choice I am faced with, and survival has always been a high priority for me.
My friends, look at how we are becoming so readily what we once despised! How we scar our visage and maim ourselves with the tattoo of conformity for the sake of shelter and comfort! Why do our dreams so readily dissolve?
I guess it's a compromise I'm looking for to save me from despair, either that or Never‑Never‑Land, but my mind wields the sharper blade of practicality that leaves a haunted look upon my face and a wounded soul within.
My friends... I'm growing up.
[© 1993 Joseph Wheeler, all rights reserved]