Youth

Life has been a blur, between playing soccer in three digit weather and reading snippets of in a hopeless attempt to sharpen my reading comprehension abilities for the coming semester, which, for the first time, will be away from a place called home.

This is the last summer where I can live like a wayward balloon drifting away from a growing child's 13th birthday party, careless, slow, purposeless, yet floating along with a silent serenity and joy that mimics that of the smiles of the parents of the child watching him teeter and totter on the boundary of childhood and adulthood.    For a few seconds everyday, I can feel as if I never grew up at all, watching the kids chase the ball around, and trying remember my fading recollections of childhood.  Sometimes I cry in solitude over all the missed opportunities, all the wrong turns, but yet, I am lifted up by the smell of grass as I careen into the ground, a bicycle kick unsuccessful, once again (how the hell do you even score with a bicycle kick?).

The invigorating youthful spirit that has burned so fiercely throughout my adult life is wavering, and I can feel a part of me getting older, wiser, sadder, and I begin to miss the packed schedules of my childhood.  Soccer games and piano lessons have been replaced with lectures and professors, with schedules and deadlines.  Does our perspective on life change as we are afflicted with the disease of aging?  I sometimes have dreams about the day when I am a gray head looking at the next generation of sinners, lovers, and dreamers.  What will it be like?

I am only but 21.