"(...) Back when I was a teenager, I would take the bus to school everyday. Often during these rides, I couldn't help but notice the gap between me and older people from eighteen years-old to twenty something who were sitting there. They had a look about them - about their distant eyes, the way their lids seem to cover up their pupil a tad too much - like they had had some sad, sobering revelation about life. Myself, I was still very confused about it all: why I was alive, who I was, how great or how desperately mediocre a person I was proving to be - but them: they looked like they understood something crucial that I could not yet. As if these few years separating us had taken some major, decisive toll. In a sense it made them awe-inspiring to me; I looked forward to being like them; actual, recognizable hardships would make people respect me more.


Of course, it also terrified me.


Time, ever so generously, proved my fears right.


What would cause me pain though,

what it was that would make me grow up, wide-eyedness gone,

I hadn't expected.

It was, indeed, not novelties as I had once assumed - foreign elements that would end up ramming their way into my life and devastate it, something new and ugly about the adult world that had been hidden to me up till then and wreaking havoc now - , as much as, through new experiences, continued confirmations of being decidedly just myself and the world being just what it was: both, a disturbing mess with few, relative beauties, some thrilling roads to explore, a seemingly endless number of things to create

but above all too many unanswered questions

and an unbearable, soul-crushing amount of limitations. (...)"