Vintage.

I don’t know how I got to 22.

Or rather: I don’t know how I’ve gotten so close to 23.

It’s like I blinked once and suddenly transmogrified from a helpless boy, vicariously searching for his nonpariel in the trove of his idyllic life, to a man with real issues and even realer responsibilities. There’s no longer the time to explore the horizon when the ship should’ve sailed years ago. Up until this point ,  I’ve indulged in a life of impetuous consternation, shunned to a brooding discomfort by the same devices I muddled through.

Conversing with others no longer feels productive. Instead, it’s turned into a game of “are they being disingenuous?”, and I’ve always gotta be the host… I used to believe the ideal weekend for me was smoking a few blunts and hopping on the game with the boys. Now, it all feels like we’re scraping time away from the clocks of our mortality, utilizing the already sparse free time we have to “have fun” when the fun’s become restricted in intervals and moments.

Abstinence is to subsistence as eating is to drink water, and a pleasure that is no longer ephemeral becomes an addiction. It’s an easy lesson to learn whilst difficult to evoke without some sort of internal backlash.

It’s as though I’ve been running in place, trying to reconcile the boy who once believed in endless horizons with the man who now feels the weight of every passing second.

Will they ever thread the distance?