Golden Memories

When a sun melted my hands and my brain got shaved and sharpened by a razor. I see it all too clearly now. 

When I stopped digging to China in my sandbox,

I had outgrown figuring out the shapes in the clouds.

Or wondering if I ate a fluffy cloud, would they taste just like cotton candies.

I grew bored of monsters, those that once struck fear into my heart-seeking out things even more terrible.

I used my bike not as transportation, the funnest way to seek out adventures, but as a tool for exercise.

It was no longer easy making fast friends. We had rigorous criteria.

No one wanted to play pretend. What did one get out of it? It was too hard to envision a something from a nothing, and make sense of it all.

We really wanted to stroke each other's egos.

They judged me by what I wore and how I spoke.

Did I make the right noise, the right inflections? It was a contest. Who could sound more grown-up.

I took extra care after that, building a shell all around myself, transforming into a puppet, a parrot that echoed back my group's sentiments. I became a glob, a mold to them, to survive.

I no longer had that curiosity to see what glue tasted like.

I no longer marveled at the sight of rainbows, seeing it as a sign for a cosmic good or waiting for a princess to walk down one and give me an important mission to save her kingdom.

Outside became a filthy place with too many bugs.

The clean, sopisticated, cold places on TV became my new obsession.

No one seemed to really live in them because, how else could they be so immaculate?

They were showrooms for show dummies.

So cool!

I ignorantly shouted.

I couldn't make up games from scratch anymore. 

I needed clear instructions to have fun, and a physical place to endure it.

I didn't want to be seen by mom and dad.

The mall became my playground.

I didn't run just to run, just to test my strength, to see how fast my surroundings changed with the movement of my feet.

And the exhilaration that came from the Breeze, from becoming an element in nature. And a feeling I belonged in that place in time, doing something beautiful yet simple. No rhyme or reason to it but a good emotion.

There was no such thing as fatigue, but now,

My energy has died, and I am always dog tired.

Not able to appreciate the simple beauties; we destroy them since they've gotten harder to enjoy, they've gone obsolete for beauties more burdensome, ridiculously complex, abstract. These beauties flirt and tease and never give you the real thing. I was made to think of serious things, like the true test of success or poverty. I was forced to learn instead of the interest of it being sparked by a do-gooder teacher. I just wanted to stay in my own little world, self absorbed, with my own little toys. I didn't want to share.

No one else wanted to share either.

The second act had come around, the third act distant, but making me ponder it aloud. What is this death? Do I care to be remembered? No, but...

Why couldn't I be a lost boy? Or lost somewhere in the universe?

But I was lost by name.

Why were people calling me by my grandmother's name?

Did they forget the nickname I had grown up to and had known?

I am different somehow, though, I guess. My face has changed a bit.

I feel it but then I don't because there is no sure marker.

I've come to the realization that the world gives you more character building stunts to undergo and your opinions of everything around you changes and you change as you go.

Growing pains were a mental and physical agony.

I soon stretched, and my mind expanded to a breaking point.

My father's mistakes became apparent.

My parents weren't the Gods I thought they were. The moral compass. The highest standard.

They both made pretty terrible mistakes.

Someone crushed my rose-tinted glasses. And told me they looked stupid.

Someone turned the picture black and white.

I have no more role models.

The great men and women are dead. I have to find my own path.

Be my own person.

But what, pray tell, is that when I've gotten all that I am from other beings?

Is it how I treat people or how I treat myself?

Or how I want to be perceived, do I fail at that?

There are too many memories to keep count of.

I wish I could remember them all, to have a better enjoyment of life.

To pin-point the small little changes that turned into big ones.

What has life turned me into?

How many people dropped into my life and colored my views. I'm this world, pressed upon by impressions.