THE CUSP OF REBIRTH:

My life begins as do all lives: with a sense of wonder. Yet it is not long into wonder that I am robbed of my sense of opportunity and told to become realistic. So I begin to plot for the future, under the pressure of adulthood that I take to be benevolent in childish innocence. I imagine this Future to be of surpassing Wonder and Opportunity to the purgatory that is childhood.

And then imagine my shock as I arrive, and my fellows tell me to GROW UP! Yet by so saying they mean instead to say that I must be “realistic”. And I reply that this was the Nature of My Life for the greater part of seventeen years. And they frown, for they know that they had spent that time enjoying those sweet opportunities that I had had to pass up. Their adulthood is but a cold veneer: a seal upon the underground refuge in which they contain their treasure hoard of memories.

This is what distinguishes my childhood from theirs: that my Wonder was so long pushed into the background that it crept up, unformed and untied to the known laws of nature, like a metaphysical being that threatened to engulf me. I know too that I am not alone in thinking of it in this way, and I’ve thought of it as such since before I ever heard it likewise represented.

But theirs is a childhood that is formed, hardened, and bound to the laws of space and time. Theirs is not unresolved suspense but fulfillment to excess. So they sit upon that hoard of memory and build upon that stone their Church.

As with any Church it is polluted with hypocrisy. The veneer falls at the earliest moment that they see an opportunity, whomever it might rightfully belong to. They behave like infants then, and their adulthood is only an attempt to preserve the perpetuation of their childhood. The wine has lost its freshness but it has begun to ferment, and so it is with memories. These addicts that surround me are in constant pursuit of that High which can only be felt in Novelty. And they envy me. For now they have no alternative but to grow up. Yet I, having grown up early, have ahead of me only the pursuit of that flavor that is still new to me.

Whom shall I taste?

Dm.A.A.