Childhood has Officially Expired

Unseen by myself (old work)

Sometimes it feels like I'm drowning in myself. Then I'm drowning myself in the change around me.

It's like I feel, but I shouldn't; and I see, yet I don't.

I see this life for what it is, but also see the fantasy and choose to ignore the reality. And it's making me overwhelmed, but at the same time it's letting me realize things.

My whole life is time. Rushing here, don't have time for that, make time for this, don't have time for you, make time for me, be here on time. I'm aware that the world is time, but as I've noticed, no one is rushed. People rush themselves. I'm slow because I hate rushing.

People get mad at me for being slow, but it's because I don't go with the world. I don't rush, but that's all my family does. "We don't have time for this, we need to make sure we have time for this, we need to can't do that until we do this by then."

It's a never ending cycle, and it's torturing my world. I feel captured by the horses and the time I have there, or the time I have to write or read. I feel trapped by the impending time of change, and growing up.

It's only a matter of time before I have to go to work next, or before I have to figure out my college - which I think is the most pressing of all of it right now - or before Summer ends and I have to mix work, schoolwork, and College classes, or before it's the new year, or before my 17th birthday, or before I turn 18 and move out and graduate high school.

It's only a matter of time before I don't talk to best friend, or before I see my ex-best friend somewhere, or before I see my ex and ex-best friend while I'm working, or before I have to move on from my family in live out of state and away. The most dooming of all is growing up, and loosing my best friend to the world while I'm at it.

I sob because I don't know what I'm doing, or where I'm going to go next, or who I'm going to loose next. I haven't gone through life loosing person after person. I've just lost them all at once, and I fear the time of when it happens again. Then again. Then I move on because I'm a living adult.

The stress of just walking around and being okay is immaculate, and I don't know what I'm doing. Soon I'm going to have to do on my own, and it's not like I don't know how. I do. It's the fear that, knowing myself, I'm going to shut down in the process and shut everyone out until it's too late to get them back and I live in guilt or regret.

Because my brain looks at it, and my heart crumbles. Crumbles like a pile of stacked up clothes. It just keeps building and building and building. . .until it doesn't, and it all comes toppling down right on top of me.

My mind looks at the aspect of time deeper than I could even attempt to explain, and sees the limit of it. Sees the limit of the living in the now, but the truth of. . .I can't. I don't have that option. I have the option of working and burning myself out, and starting college with fear, and growing up without the ones I was supposed to grow up with before the world swallowed them whole.

My way of coping is writing and reading. I read - or more, immerse myself - into the world of fiction. Of a whole new and different world. Where my mind can latch onto their reality instead and feel their anxiety instead, their happiness and love instead.

Or better yet, where I can make my own world. Where I can dream of and write out a whole world of my own. Where in my own head, they're real. But even when the book ends, their story continues. Because people say once a novel ends, the story is done and the characters don't exist anymore. That they never did; they were just an illusion on a piece of paper. On a page.

But they weren't. They live in their world, in our minds, and in their own universe. With their own fate. You can't break that. They live just as along as this world does, and they feel just as we feel. The difference is their stories are written on pages with symbols we use to understand their lives.

They love as we love, and that's what I adore. That as soon as I start typing, a new world is discovered, not created. It's discovered and written out as their lives go on. It's written in between the lines that are blank. In between the miniscule grooves of the pages.

This world is so overwhelming, and so misfitting for ones like me, if there even are any. Ones that know things others don't, and those who actually, full heartedly believe as others don't, who choose to love as others don't. Who don't live through tragedy but feel as if they have.

Who hate themselves because they're their own menace to their soul. Because something they can't control, and something that they feel, is too taxing on their own emotions and wellbeing. Simply because that's how they were made. Not how they were raised, not how they were pressured into, and not how they were changed. Just who they are.

What's wrong with this is they aren't to be fighters. . .but they must be if they want to give a world - of unseen and in between those lines - to people who only can through the influence or help. Who want to see the world more, no matter how much pain it tears through them, because they love the pain of such an imperfect world. They sob for the ones around them, drown in sorrow for their own selves, but smile in sadness as they watch the world around them crumble with it's beauty packed safely inside; protected by the armor from around it.

The armor they placed through their own agony. For the ones they love; and for the ones they don't even know.

Word Count: 1,073 words