On Not Growing Up

My mother woke up when she heard me cry. I was nine-years-old and sad. I can’t tell for sure what it was but I remember telling my mother I was sad because I wasn’t a kid anymore. She said it was okay, and that I was still a child and that I still had a lot of time before I stopped being a child.

Maybe earlier that day I was expected to do something I felt I couldn’t do and that brought about this need to remain a child forever. Maybe. And maybe I still wish that could happen, to live a life of no consequence and no responsibility.

Then when I was getting older all I wanted was the responsibility. I wanted to be trusted, to be counted on, to prove the world I was an adult. Maybe that’s why I was eager to join the army.

After the army I was so disenchanted with the adult world that recognition by society had suddenly become a bad thing, and the only way for me to live was to revert to a time of lonely insignificance; the childhood state I still experience.