free-falling

Flying down the driveway, wind breezing through my hair, pedal faster, no disaster, anywhere.

Care-free, look at me soar, legs moving faster, steer left, steer right, avoid the bumps in sight, and hold on tight.

Suddenly the world shifts, and I begin to lose control, shaky now my legs brake, and I fall.

Wipe-out, wreck, lose-it-all just to get back up again, skinned up knees and bleeding elbow, smile so wide, so wide.

Can't you see? Our lives are centered around the moments when we take a risk, and lose it. The first time we try to crawl, and nose-dive into the carpet. The moment, we try to walk, and fall back down again. Playing tag in the backyard, no cares in the world, trip over a tree-root, and it hurts so bad. But, there's no time for that.

We get up again. We shake it off and get back to living. When we're young and restless, we know there's no time for crying. So we go, go, go, cause we don't know the weight of the world. And we live, live, live, cause we don't know the burden of struggles.

We grow up. We're informed, now. We know that the world isn't this picture-perfect-reality. We've learned what it feels like to be hurt, and, we've learned how to hold a grudge. We were taught to spite, to hate, to differentiate--between wrong and right, between good and bad, between who we should be and who we are. We were taught to judge, to assess a situation, a person, a lifestyle, everything we come across. Yeah, we inherited the cynicism.

Someone showed us that there are people who better than us, and people we're better than. Someone explained that there's a lot of bad, and that caution is the greatest protection.

We learned to yield, abandon the fast-forward lifestyle. We learned to feel, abandoned the live-life attitude. We learned to be, acceptable members of a community. We learned responsibility, political correctness, rules and regulations. We grew up, to become someone we never really understood. We look back now, and see how good we had it, before they changed us, before this happened.

We once knew just what life was made of. We once saw the good in everything. They closed our minds, they pulled us in from floating with the stars. They brought us down, they set our feet upon the ground. And we accept it. We don't fight for the life we know is better than this. We settle into our patterns, our traditions, our reasoning for being boring. We call ourselves practical, but we're just whipped by the societal bounds.

There was once a time when we had faith in the world. We trusted our friends, and our family, and anyone we met. They protected us then, but maybe we were protecting them. Giving them a reason to believe that they were right, that the life of a child is always temporary.

Time, how does that work out anyway? When we're young, there's so much, and we keep ourselves straight. But then as we go on, the pressure comes, and. We can feel it, building around us. All of these commitments, a need for sleep we didn't have when we were young, time's gone. It's wasting, but we're wasting it. Focusing our energy on all the wrong things, the hate and the judgment, and the grudges. Maybe we can't fight it, maybe it's human nature, maybe it's an unbreakable cycle of tradition. But maybe, just maybe, we can be more than we see.

I want to expect more of myself. I want to be more than what I've found around me. I want to work my way back to childhood ideology. That's the secret, that's the way to live my life. I want this, I want that, I want to be that person. The one who, gets back up. The one who, trusts. The one who, opens mind and heart to those that others won't. I want to be the opposite of everything that life has taught me. I want to be the kind of person no one would expect me to be. I want to be remembered. I want to be unique, and good. I want to apply the life of childhood to the everyday circumstances that I know face. What's so wrong with that?

Why shouldn't I demand of myself more than what others settle for?

That's where I stand.

This is who I am.