Youth

It has recently dawned upon me that I have come to a new chapter in my life, stranger, greater, and more awful than those before it all at once. It is the strange and inevitable impasse that all people come to at some point in their lives, no longer a child but not yet considered an adult, yet carrying the burdens of bother, and a freedom held by neither. The point at which every road is an exit and any direction is a destination. I’ve seen so many in my generation robbed of this great time of life — that of learning, growing, coming of age through the tempering fire of youth and reckless abandon — thrust too soon into the mundanities and routines of ‘adulthood’ either by the selfish and uncaring hand of those around them or the apathetic and endless tides of fate. They did not choose the short cut they have been forced to take, to by pass the great highways and city-streets of that purgatorial youth. Even so, they are forced to act as Sisyphus, toiling at their dead-end, spiritless jobs which the cling to like the last pure drop of water in an endless seas of salt-water bullshit. My fear is that they have so soon reached the end; that the thirst for adventure and kicks and all that’s new and great will be gone from them and they will be content to lap up their salt-water paychecks, forever knowing the same few people, forever drinking in the same sad sheds and basements which they have haunted since high school. I wish for nothing more than to free them, to take them from their Hell, point them down a road and scream “Go!”. To watch them fly down those cornfield back roads with the same hope and fire and sweat the pumps from the heart of the jagged and the free. I wish I could return to them their youth, return to them all they have lost in the awful impatience of my generation — that of growing up much to fast or, far too often, completely all at once. I cannot claim to not have fallen victim to the same, but dammit, I’m holding on, and I wish I could help them do the same.