Once upon a time, I was a kid. When I was growing up, I was a kid. Sometime after my eleventh birthday, and I was in grade 6, my mom told me I was still a kid. A boy in my class disagreed. He said we were preteens. Even when I was a teenager, I still considered myself a kid. I’m not a kid anymore. Any person that can buy lottery tickets and get drunk and has an age that starts with a “2” is not a kid. Yes, I am quite sure; I am no longer a kid.
When I was a kid, the world was very black and white. So black and white, that I didn’t speak in metaphors. Adults most certainly did not speak in metaphors to me. I only know that I saw the world in black and white because I am now an adult. (Add that to the list of reasons I am not a kid.) Now, my world is grey; it’s okay to lie if it’s for a greater cause, it’s okay to like two people at the same time if there’s no label on it and you’re honest enough to hurt both of their feelings, it’s okay to give up on things if it’s in your best interest. It’s okay to be selfish. In kindergarten I was told that I had to share with classmates who had no meaning to me. Now, if my co-worker asked to borrow my car, no one would blame me for saying “no”. Actually, it would be crazier to let them borrow it than to put a “boundary” in place. Maybe growing up is only the act of unlearning these habits of sharing, being kind, and caring.
The structure of black and white provided simplicity, but I still like being an adult more than a kid–I think. Growing up, I was constantly confused without knowing the source of my anxiety, or even realizing that I was anxious. I thought I had to be special to be special. I thought I had to be great to be worth something. It took my becoming an adult to exist without guilt. Now, I’m more comfortable with my human condition than ever; the answer seems to be that there is no answer. My best might be enough, and it also might not be. All the cliches are true, but it’s taken time to find the truth in their triteness. It’s not all that satisfying to use a bandaid of a proverb to mend the hole of dissatisfaction in my heart, but it’s easier to stop looking for an
answer knowing that there’s no answer. To some things, at least. Maybe I am less anxious because there is less possibility. My potential runs out every day that I live. There is less and less to be anxious about, but also less to be excited about, to be curious about. So, adults create curiosity and suspense, speaking in metaphors.
I see the world in shades of grey. That’s a metaphor. An adult metaphor, but not like the adult book, more like the way I was explaining. Grey is boring. Grey is a mix of black and white. It’s in everything. Before, when it was all black and white, there was no grey in anything. Two absolutes somehow can’t create possibility. There’s not much room for subtlety.
Questions?
Imagination?
Grace?
Nuance is fun until it isn’t.
Nuance is a whisper in the wind and fingertips grazing each other in passing. It’s apprehension and hope, but living this transgressive state forever is exhausting. I want to scream when the professor won’t shut up, run so hard and fast that I vomit, feel the weight and warmth of another body pressing against mine. I speak in metaphors like it means something beyond a convoluted way to say I miss the simplicity of yesterday. When the world was bright and color surrounded me so overwhelmingly that I had to go to bed at 8PM just to process the world of possibility. Adult me calls that, “seeing the world in black and white”. Adult me tries to capture the entire essence of an existence with even more metaphors, decadently stacked atop each other. I do not like when deserts are too sweet, but I still eat them. I’m bored. What’s language more than the metaphor of shapes on a page, anyhow?
Even now, I wastefully bleed words onto the page without inhibition or shame. As if I don’t reel in the attention it takes to decode the complexity of my existence. As if my life is of
great wonder beyond the next twenty-something who contains equal and infinite amounts of multitudes and nothingness. I can hear the echo within myself. It comes back to me. It has to have sounded off something. I don’t remember what it said though; I was talking. The End.