A Ticket

I hate being an adult.

You learn that this is not the movies. No matter how hard you try, the effort, you can end up being the bad guy. You would always lose even with the best intentions, though you are not entirely at fault, you'd lose. You become emotionless.

I used to see things in B&W. Now it’s all varying shades of grey.

Way back when, I just saw things as they are. It was plain and simple. Bad guys liked to create problems for everyone and the good guys tried to make things right. Satan was evil and God was good. Now that I’m older and perhaps a little wiser, I find that my notion of evil was so many levels removed from what is truly evil and that too much of a good thing can also be bad. The people who profess to be good also have their various interests that they want to move forward and selflessness is perhaps just a concept I studied in class. 

People are gone.

Whether they are friends or family, people are gone forever. I have a lot of good memories having been blessed with a brain that can still recollect the past. I want to go back to the time when I was young and I had everyone around me. I am glad that I can reminisce but I would rather I can give them hugs and tell them how valuable they are to me.

On being depended on…

As a kid, I just wanted to play. Whether it was contra or castlevania, whether it was playing a game of tag or hide & seek. Play was the four-letter word that was OK to say out loud without getting in trouble (unless my report card had the colour red). I have emails to answer, contracts to sign, decisions to make. From Monday to Friday, I get messages & calls and have to do meetings because people need me to. Even if I just wanted to crawl under my sheets and be dead to the world, my adult conscience won’t let me.  I want to say it sucks to be me but I can imagine millions more out there have suckier lives and so come Monday morning, my alarm clock will wake me up at the appointed time and I have to experience the drudgery of adult life.

Can I just unlearn?

Ignorance is bliss. My curious mind has definitely killed the kitten inside me. There are things that I cannot unsee and things that I cannot unlearn. Knowing certain things makes you presume things and kills excitement. It makes you plan for contingencies. It makes you cynical. Which brings me to…

I have forgotten how to puppy love.

Do you remember how you’d fall madly in love back in middle school? The type of intoxicating love that grabs hold of you and lets you think that with just love, everything will be alright? The type of love where you push yourself and exert so much effort to get the affection of your one true love? As an adult, I cannot experience this again with so many factors that I have to consider such as family, backgrounds, culture, and many more. I was told that I should use my head and not my heart and unfortunately, ignoring my heart must have caused it to malfunction as I can’t make it work in the same way as when I was younger. I have always said that the kind of love you experience when you’re young is much purer as compared to the diluted love you experience as an adult.

But life goes on…

I want to turn back time to the years when life was fun. When life had more meaning. When life meant waking up to awesome Saturday morning cartoons and having McDonald’s shakes. When life was waiting for your crush down the hall just so you can catch a whiff of their hair and try to guess the shampoo they used. When life afforded me the chance to go home and have family dinners with my entire family. It sucks to be an adult burdened with the monotony of the daily grind, superficial materialism and living up to social standards that benefit others more than they benefit me. But such is life and such are the chains that bind me and hold me down though there is always tomorrow and with each dawn comes a new hope.