The Breaking of Youth

I remember my twenties. I remember there were smiling, collegial accolades and special dinners in rooms lined with antique books, there were corporate fortresses of glass and steel where people in smart suits and dresses (with just a touch of red or maybe lavender)ran around over gray carpet from one big, white electric machine to another big, white electric machine, there was the shiney, new company car and aparments with polished wood floors and views of midtown. I remember it all.

But what I remember most, what I find myself thinking back to years later, are not the things of I was surrounded by, the precocious cut and measure of youth. Now, late at night, in those times when I feel that all my life has come to nothing, I find myself musing in the dark, lit by the fleeting color of the traffic light outside, about all of the intangibles of youth. Memories arise like the aroma of cinnamon and apples from the stove to crowd the mind with sweet sentiments: the feeling of exuberant power still bound in sheer physicality, the sense of unlimited potential that accompanied new-found adult freedoms, the conviction that everything would come right in the end and that surely a new epoch was upon us.

I cherish those memories, though in time the sentiments of youth were forged into harder things, all blades and armor. The world, I discovered, had been dispatching the dreams of young men and women as far back as the human story goes. And while it is unnecessary to list off the failed relationships all wrapped in crying and moments of painfull stillness, or the professional blunders captured in neat Times New Roman memos informing me of dismissal, let it suffice that I learned what all people learn sooner or later--that I am only one small creature in the vast teaming ocean of time. In other words, I am only one among many.

At first, those realizations stung. Then they burned. Like small slivers, lodging themselves under the skin, those thoughts became the bane of my every movement. Go this way and it jabs; go that way and it stings; dig at it and wound yourself; ignore it and become a coil tensed to snapping. The clever quips and smug self-assurance of youth lost all their flavor. They seemed as rancid meat too long kept. Eventually, a subtle form of despair set in. Before I knew it, my life had become one of enduring routine, filling out mindless forms, and trying not to smash my car into some equally miserable fuck on the interstate.

For a long time, I thought that was all of it. I was sure that adulthood had found me, delivered its letter, and was now just around the corner, laughing its ass off. But things changed.

In stories, we all like to see that one event, one turning point, when the progagonist becomes a hero, when he realizes what his error has been and what he must do. The character transforms and via his realization the whole of creation changes too. The world is re-born and everyone is happy. At least, that is how it goes in the stories. But in life, at least as I have found it, our transformation comes in hard-won drips and drabs, like a giant trying to rouse itself from a sleeping potion.

As I went about the rest of my life, resolved not to kill myself yet certain it would probably be a good idea, I witnessed the whispering of the souls. That changed things, bit by hard-won bit. As I sat in lines for coffee (because that is what your supposed to do in the morning) I watched hate travel from one car to another car as small, digital, console clocks inched, number by number, closer to disapproving looks from a co-workers or just to a banquet of mental self-flagellation. I watched love pass freely between a mother and her child as little hands and feet tried again and again to negotiate a set of stairs. I watched a man who didn't have a dollar to give, but did have five minutes to listen, impart peace to crack head I had seen earlier that week thrown into the backseat of a squad car. Slowly, but surely, I saw how souls whisper to each other beneath all the clatter and meaning of our simple languages.

Before I knew it, I was doing and being things I did not fully understand. Friends would tell me of how they hate their significant others, and I would buy them ice-cream. Willie, the old veteran turned hobo, and I would laugh and as we drank coffee together in the train station (Willie actually isn't a hobo--that is just the act he runs to get money in his hat). Soon, the people and halls of work became painted with a thousand beautiful dream-colors of my co-workers hopes for their children and loved ones. In time, I even found myself happily letting people cut me off on the highway.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not relating any of this because I want you to know I'm a swell guy. I still continue to do as much wrong as I do right. If values like that even apply. But what I have found, what has sustained me, is that we have power. Maybe it's not the genie-like magnificence that youth dreams will deliver its every wish (and maybe that's a good thing). Yet we have an undeniable power to affect those about us, to spread compassion, to assuage fear, to fan the sparks of joy to an all-consuming fire. The mountains will still "crumble to the sea" and the universe will continue to turn in violent, awe-inspiring waves, but in the small spaces of this reality, in the closeness of two souls whispering, we can change the world for the people we meet. And in the end, I am OK with that.

God damn, it took a long time to grow up ;)