Free Writing: Daniel’s Perspective of his life thus far
In the good old days, time went by fast. Days blended together and all sadness was forgotten. We never even dreamed of the future because we didn’t care. We didn’t care about what might happen to us, what would happen to us; only what was happening to us. It was easy to forget that the present is the future that already happened. It was easy to be carefree when almost everything was already decided for us (to an extent.) To us, the next few minutes were all that life amounted to. We didn’t have any expectations or plans or thoughts about the future, we lived on whims. We did things because we wanted to, not because we were told to or because we felt we should.
Call it reckless. Call it stupid. We called it living. But that living changed to surviving as we grew older. Freedom isn’t really freeing, it’s responsibility and fulfilling expectations, all while acting ‘maturely.’ Think before you speak, they’d say. We were told not to follow our hearts and to be levelheaded. Our hearts were broken, put back together, and broken all over again. Eventually we didn’t even try to fix them — we just went on with the few scraps we were willing to pick up. We wouldn’t ever fully love again and we knew it. Each heartbreak stole a piece of us. And eventually we were nothing but the shell what used to be.
And when you couldn’t handle it all yourself, you depend upon drinking and drugs and meaningless sex. Trust me — I’ve done it all. They don’t make you feel full or good, really, but they don’t leave you feeling empty. And that’s probably the best thing you’ve felt in a long time.