Maybe we are just little boys and girls...

You see the twinkling eyes, filled with hope of a better tomorrow, our tomorrow, festered and grown and moulded by our own hands.

You see the progeny of Atlas, readying themselves to take the burden of the world from the shoulders of their forefathers

You see creased brows, slight disappointment at what our today is like because we have to live with the mistakes of our ancestors.

You see a generation at the brink of adulthood, ready to take the dive

But see, you see not wrong, you just see incomplete

Behind the disappointment towards ancestors is a heart full of dread- a heart that fears messing up just like they did

The twinkling eyes hide the swirling storm inside, the one caused by fear of the big, bad cesspool that this world is

Shoulders squared for responsibility aren’t squared, they are tensed.

The fisting of hands isn’t a show of strength and readiness, its just that the pain of fingernails digging into skin seems to halt the thrumming of blood that pounds in our ears

In all these elaborate matters of the heart, of teenage romance, somewhere inside, it just feels like we are back to playing house

Maybe that twinkle in the eye isn’t a twinkle at all, maybe its just that our eyes are watery, that we want to burst into tears of anxiety, fear and loss, cause we sure do understand those terms now.

Maybe we aren’t as strong as we seem to be, or maybe we can’t stay so put together anymore

Whatever it is, the truth is that the facade is cracking, and if you just look close enough, you will see what I see

You will see a bunch of boys and girls pretending to be men and women

The truth is, we aren’t at the brink of a dive, we are at the threshold between wanting to take the dive and being ready to take it

The facade isn’t malicious, it isn’t a wolf in sheep’s clothing

It can be more easily likened to that time, so long ago, when we used to don dad’s t-shirt that came to below our knees and pretend to be adults

Maybe we are just little boys and girls, scared to be drowned in the garment of adulthood, just this time, without anyone to fish us out