We were living on the fast lane; feeling the wind brush through our hair. We had one life to live but we chose to gamble with it nonetheless. We knew the dangers of living on the edge but that fear was greatly outweighed by the thrill of the moment in which we were hanging helplessly on the cliff of life by a weak slippery hand. As close as we were to death and oblivion, we also got to witness a greater force than we had ever imagined possible. We saw nature and her beauty flashing before us in far mightier colours than our eyes could stomach in their dry state. We saw the wrong in us and the flames that we were to endure for such. We realised the true worth of what we had and the importance of the people we had it with.
We started living with the assumption that we didn’t look good enough and that we had to change who we were. We spent fortunes killing the faintest scent of beauty that still existed in the air around us replacing it with what we mistook for better faces. We became shadows of our own selves – moving along but on a different plane. Like shadows,we disappeared into the night and allowed it to take us to places where those of high scrutiny did not exist. We let the darkness take us to darker places where, in colourful lights and raving sounds, we could discover the true light within us. Our nights floated helplessly upon the waves of wine and harmful spirits which we knew could only make us forget our wails for a while only for them to come back with greater intensity but that was all we wanted; we wanted to forget awhile. We wanted to be reckless in the moment and write our stories in our own way.
Boys got used to running after girls; girls got used to running away when both of them should have been chasing love. We believed in love and allowed it to bring us joy and twice as much pain. We neglected friendship and the values it once presented in our lives. We fell in love too soon and crawled our way out of it even faster. We decided that love and friendship could not co-exist and that we could not have both with the same person. We lost love – if we ever had it in us at all. We saw the bad in the midst of good, anticipated heartbreak on first dates and romance became a bounty hunt.
We got used to the pain, we got used to reality. We fell in love with the cold dark corners of our rooms. We knew rage was bad and that it only brought with it a bad aura but we submitted to it anyway. It was the voice we needed to shout. It was the energy we needed to fight and it was the evil we very much wanted to taste. We fought over religion and killed each other over matters of race. We killed each other with bullets and, even more brutally, using words. We became accustomed to the voices of children screaming in our heads shattered by the world they had been born into; a world we had destroyed. Our eyes finally submitted to the long tenuous nights, staring at the ceiling and conversing silently. Sleep evaded us and took away our dreams as well – the only escape we had from this wild whirlwind we were calling a life.
We got used to busy schedules and having no time for living. We had all the time in the world and no time at all. Our minds became overwhelmed with hate and discrimination. We killed those of our own on the trivial basis of different colour, opinion or simply in a bid to assert dominance. We put too much value on the principles of religion and it’s hierarchy that we forgot the true purpose of these beliefs that had become part of our lives – bringing people together and ushering a hope when all seems but bleak. We were sinking in a sea of lies and the iron ball tied savagely to our feet was dragging us deeper into it. We spent every breathing moment we had worrying about the next or the last few moments that we no longer had a say on. We lost grip of the fact that our lives were moving and that we had to move along with them.
In moments of sorrow, we consumed anything we could find as if all our problems were somehow related to how many fish sticks we had. Nonetheless, we complained about how the world had become such a filthy cafeteria serving us with nothing but portions of death. We judged our children on how well they did in school and went on to make wayward predictions about how their lives would turn out. We gave a blind eye to talent and let our Michelangelos fade away in 3 pm Physics classes. Our drive for doing anything became increasingly reliant on how much the bank would appreciate our efforts rather that the will to express, inspire and grow. We loved the man on the eight o’clock news although he was constantly feeding us lies.
We had two lives to live: the one we were meant to live and the one people around us wanted us to live. We chose neither of these and decided to submit to the unfazed currents of the wind and see where they would take us. We grabbed the world by the neck in a choking fashion and suffocated it in blows of smoke and gallons of oil. We forgot Mother Nature and allowed her children to die in traps we were the makers of. We had too much to write and say but no one was willing to read or listen. We only wanted ears for our violent cries to fall upon and a cup of Earl Grey for the late afternoon winter breeze. We wanted new friends because our old ones were not friends at all but we hung on to false relations in fear of the gulf that would form between us.
We woke up to hear new things about our own lives that we never knew. We based our worth on retweets and tags and waved farewell to actual conversation simply because it wasn’t the 90’s anymore. We finally admitted that we had gone about life the wrong way but we couldn’t change it because it was the only way we knew how to live. Our mothers told us that it was okay even though it wasn’t because they knew that their words mattered to us. We made fun of others because it made us feel like we were better off. We left bad reviews on Amazon simply because we could and shot ourselves in the legs for YouTube hits. We were always in a hurry and never quite said what we really wanted to say. Nonetheless, our hearts were beating, we had a place to sleep and enough food to keep ourselves alive and although these were testing times indeed, we knew that there was probably worse ahead and these times we were shedding tears for would at some point be labelled the good old days – so we lived on and laughed harder. It wasn’t the best; it was the NOW we had. OUR NOW!