Kids these days grow old before their time.  Not just in the way they dress or the way they paint their faces and their personalities, but most tragically, in the way they view the world.  Coincidences loses its magic, dreams are left under the pillow and disappointment becomes easier and easier to swallow. 

No matter how I tell my mother that success to me is not measured by:

1. slaving away to make a lot of money and retiring early

2. high social status

3. marrying a wealthy/ high status partner so I can buy expensive things/ be envied

*note: include kids with all of the above

she does not understand!  

Really.  I tell her patiently, angrily, cheerfully, tearfully, desperately…and my words fly over her.  She insists she wants me to be happy, but she is so used to associating happiness with money that anything beyond her concept of success is failure or a waste of time and honestly that breaks my heart.  To truly show your appreciation for the life you are given is to pick your nose in front of everyone and eat it!  Just kidding.  But really, live YOUR life.  Money and what people whisper behind your back should never mean more than freedom and love.  Sometimes I want to shake her by the shoulders and ask her if she was stripped of all her worldly possessions, what would be left…would she or anyone else know who she was?  

A bank statement, a diamond ring or a “title” does not validate your existence.  Cliche as it sounds; you exist when you are remembered…really remembered!…not for the materials you’ve collected or the work you’ve done for all the wrong reasons, but for who you—as only you can be—are, even if it’s by one person.   

I could say that I don’t care what kind of life other people live, but I do.  I want everyone to live truly and happily and freely, not just through the instant gratification of a couple of days of vacation or a new shirt, but to feel like you’ve run as hard as you can just for the hell of it and even though you’ve skidded to a stop, you can still feel the blood in your throat and the world and your heart roaring in your ears and you think you might die, but you are so alive in that moment that you don’t give a damn about anything else and you’re laughing and crying.    

Such is the world, and the system but we can continue to plant seeds in people’s minds and hearts that we could live differently and believe with all of ours that they will grow, because c’est la vie, but it is still OUR life.   

When we are born, we know nothing of the world.  Little by little outlines become sharper, we learn to see the red of our tongues, the blue of our sky.  We realize that humans, like the fireflies we cup in our palms as kids, are not infinite, and we wonder: what are we living for?

I lived for the memory of my father’s silhouette appearing at the door, for beautiful and sad words strung together like laundry on a clothesline; I lived for late nights on the porch with my grandfather-him burning his lungs and me burning my eyes with starlight-both of us contemplating that there was something more.  

I lived and cried and died when I read The History of Love by Nicole Krauss and when Faye Wong sang if frown is shown then, I will know that you are no dreamer, I vowed that I would smile. 

The summer all us big kids gathered to dream our big dreams in a small cave in the clouds, with only a breeze every now and then to cut through the smokey late afternoon heat, we lived.   

And when he kissed me, the kind of kiss where you are left breathless not by the act, but by the intensity of the connection between two souls, I lived then too.

I lived and live for poetry, music, art and the people and stories that move me, because without them I don’t think I would be here, at least not truly.  If a person falls in a forest and no one is around to see him, did he fall?  Did he even exist? 

I think all of us are just a fragment of our greatest potential.  As we grow up, we begin to settle for pieces, we begin to let the world define us and in the end, we are left wondering why we never found ourselves.