It’s 4 minutes into the new day and I find myself on the internet. Facebook to be exact. It has become more of an addiction than the distraction that it once was.
I flick the light switch off and come to bed, my blanket pulled to my chest. It's worn threadbare now, a relic of my childhood but the source of most of my warmth and comfort during those trying and sometimes unbearable years. Like an old, faithful pup, it has continued to keep me company though its best days have passed.
The rain falls as it has been for the last four hours.
The drops on the roof sound garbled and every so often a cold wind blows that lifts the ceiling tiles and drops them back down, in a well choreographed dance. A colder breeze blows and the blanket reaches my neck. I know one day it will fail to offer me protection. But for now, it is my only refuge. As I lie here contemplating, I wonder when exactly I grew up, making that transition from boy to man. It was probably around 8 or 9, a full hand of years before puberty. We make our judgments on rigid timetables set for us by our biologists. Hardly ever do we acknowledge that we place in the minds of our children the tasks of adults. Physically, the body bears it, but the mind is forever changed, in ways so profound, that we can never truly recover the simplicity of our childhood, however short it may have lasted. What I can’t place is that time I became hardened, frigid and cynical.
Life tests us. Whether it is a designed assessment to achieve a higher end or simply happenstance, we find ourselves caught in a web, trying to extract only that which can adequately and safely nourish us, but sometimes being forced to consume poisons such as hate, jealousy and criticisms for actions that are inherently private and no one else’s concern.
That is why I no longer attempt to please everyone. It’s why I now try to live as freely as I could without depending too much on others. And it’s why I am now trying to break this mould that has set for years. But it is an exercise in isolation to continue along this path. For there will always be the desire for being needed and loved. To intertwine one’s fingers with another’s. To close your eyes and know that you can completely trust. To love without castigation and hate. But most of all, to simply live, without having to kill your true self.
‘How far you go in life depends on your being tender with the young, compassionate with the aged, sympathetic with the striving and tolerant of the weak and strong. Because someday in life you will have been all of these.’- George Washington Carver
12:27am Tue 03/27/2007
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