teenaging (updated)
teenaging is when the neighborhood seemed most alive those days were once spirited and bright, minutes and seconds passed like hours, and even the afterlife beyond age twelve had frightened us from our irresistible capacity for curiosity, and so i stood atop the roof during daylight, with my self-abandoned friends and cousins when there was homework due, screaming anxiously to be wild and free for unbelievable causes we’d heard on tv or read online during bookish weekdays, or developed as a function of being that age, the brick walls we created at thirteen collapsed when we were sixteen and we craved maturity, the night goaded us, looming dangerously above the blacktop adolescence brightened the same scenery we’d despise later the lonely cause of labor brought temporary pain and power the kind i remember each today and tomorrow during the era of self-sufficiency teenaging is when you’re an adult searching for some nostalgic solace the kind you can’t escape from and seek as a formality in my dreams it’s the utopian rooftop from the aughts and the friends and cousins of previous decades together the ones who joined me in parading down the cul de sac teenaging is when you’re faceless at thirty in the playground and you’re waiting for innocence to reappear, beyond solitary imagination i remember teenaging because it managed an unhealthy balance of bliss and sorrow exposed by suburban parental guidance, the kind you’d ignore and lambast til the sun fell and dwell on and suffer from til it rose again teenaging is when you’re nothing but leaves in a hurricane, the same storm that grows and grows each year.
