A Box Entitled Youth

"Child Star" by Simon Matulef

“A Box Entitled Youth” By Sidney London

The faces around me once familiar will soon morph into something different, far older and complex. Their faces will be plagued by the wrinkles from hardships of times that have passed. Each bag around their eyes are? like a ring on a tree, indicating another day in the drag of a game we call life. White hairs shoot out of their head as if they are desperately planning to escape the haunting chemicals in the brain that will soon plague them with dementia. “Run,” they are screaming. Run from what is inside. These faces around me will never look the same.

The people around me will be parents, and their children will become parents as well. Grandparents and great grandparents if they get so lucky. These moments will turn into stories. Will you recite them to your neighbors in the nursing home? The pictures tinted yellow with decay; the promise of livelihood you once knew rapidly fading. Can you remember that moment? That feeling? Gosh, how long it has been. The pictures are framed on your wall. They bring about a smile everytime you look at them, but behind your eyes is the sorrow of knowing those days are long gone. 

Right now, these moments aren’t pictures or stories. I am real. I am alive. There is promise on tomorrow’s horizon as the sun rises over a brand new glorious day. Why can’t I feel the sun’s radiance? I cannot let the light slip by me without absorbing its nourishing rays.

I am here! Shine on me. Here I stand! 

Sometimes I still walk on my tiptoes around my house. It is something I have yet to grow out of. I creep up and down the stairs as if I am a ballerina. It is starting to become ineffective, as the effects of womanhood have caught up to me. The addition of hips and breasts make it harder to caress the ground as gently as a magic pixie as I once used to. My room has two different shades of pink that dance from the floor to the ceiling. They sashay up and down the walls until they create the beautiful pink stripes that surround me. I essentially live in a cotton candy palace. I picked out the colors in kindergarten but I have not changed them since. Why would I? There is no reason to. I am a pixie cotton candy princess, and that is the way it shall remain. 

I know this is not permanent. My pixie dust is starting to run short. The paint of my cotton candy walls is starting to chip. Pollution is starting to plague my horizon. It does not look as bright and radiant as it once used to. Eventually, I will have to succumb to the life of knowing that I have already lived. Every day that passes is another cent towards its gas money. It is gearing up and soon to arrive! I cannot stop it. One day I will look in the mirror and wrinkles will invade my once youthful face. I wonder if I will still be recognizable without a sparkle in my eye. Maybe I can make a deal with the devil to stop time. Maybe I can find the fountain of youth and consume its rejuvenating liquid. I cannot live with the idea that time is passing by, but that is the issue. I also cannot waste a second worrying about a time in which I cannot live, for my time is now. 

The pixie cotton candy princess is all grown up practically. Though the numbers 1 and 8 are present on all forms of her identification, she doesn’t actually feel this way. When she blew out her candles at the ripe age of 18 the fact that there was any responsibility that came along with this number was incomprehensible. Still, the pixie cotton candy princess must resign from her crown. She knows it is time for her reign to come to an end, but that doesn’t mean it is gone forever. I’ll keep the crown with my pictures, and my stories, and my laughter, and my smiles, and my memories, and my tears, and my joy, and my radiance. I will keep it all in a box entitled “youth.” The box will sit in the storage room, for I am moving onto something greater, but mark my words, it will never be forgotten.