Wednesday, July 22, 2009

It's hard to put this into words. This strange tumult of contradictory feelings I can never quite make sense of- You feel sad when dear friends leave and move on with their lives, and you miss the past. Yet you don’t know what exactly about the past you miss, since you clearly remember the bunch of you sitting together in suffocating blue secondary school uniforms with ugly boy haircuts and blunt too-short fringes and dark circles and bright red zits as everyone talks about growing up and getting out of this shit hole and what the future holds. It's not that sense of youthful innocence I miss. We were never innocent. We were beaten down and jaded. Stupid kids from normal acad, carrying on for the mere sake of carrying on, the way one would beat a slow-moving horse already immune to the pain of the whip. I don't quite know what I miss.

We still sit together and talk about growing up and getting out of our various (new) shit holes and what the future holds, except now we have prettier hairstyles, nicer clothes, better complexions, and we dance, eyes closed tight, feet quietly aching, jumping jumping jumping up and down in the same spot for hours in clubs yelling at each other and unable to hear anything else but the insanely loud music and how each beat sounds like the beating of your very own heart. We kiss each other sloppily and drink to tomorrow. I yawn and think of my boy and from the corner of my eye she yawns and sends her girlfriend a text message. She smiles so sweetly and so tenderly I smile just looking at her. Woah. I was present during every tear she shed but I never knew she could smile like that. I wanted to ask her what she was so happy about, but suddenly felt that it wasn't my place to do so. So in a sense, nothing has changed, and yet everything clearly has.

1 comment:

sarah said...

this is a really great post :)u put words to those contradicting feelings, exactly how i feel it too.