the shoulder shrug

indian summer.

someboyhood-bravery:

scarred-skin:

I remember walking home from College and feeling like I was still a child as I spread out my arms to balance myself on the sidewalk curb used as a balance beams. As the weakening sun beat upon my back pack, I imagined I was walking home from elementary school: hot gravel, skinned knees, and the desire to race down the hill despite them. But soon, saying “I’m just a kid!” won’t work anymore. I tried to in the car, and he turned to me and said “No. You’re technically an adult.”

I looked at us all crowded around a pub table and became very frightened. We’re all stuck in our child skin, scratching at mosquito bites and picking the dirt from our nails, but we know that the day it peels off, it won’t grow back the way it has every year. Our days are no longer filled with swimming in the Summer sun. We have added in work and drinking, and on the nights we might have found ourselves racing through the streets, we’re instead cramped together saying, “Yes, I’ll have another pint.” 

I keep scratching my bites until they bleed down my legs, feeling very young, very alive, and scared. In the future there’s university and then actual careers that ask us to wake up at 9 every morning and not spend the night laughing in the streets, but sleeping in bed, waiting for the next day of work. In all this mess, how are we supposed to figure out who we are? Are we supposed to just grab at pieces of ourselves and fashion them together in a new adult skin we can wear? A soft pink coat that will bruise easily and remind us that we don’t really know what we’re doing?

What I’m trying to say is: 
I still have so many gaping holes in me, that when my sun burnt skin peels off, my new skin might be made entirely of memories. 

(via hollowed-boy)