coming-of-age

This is a test. This is only a test. If this was my actual life I'd be famous, rich, and thin.

The dark realization came to him that a difficult and miserable age had begun for him, and he couldn't imagine when it would end. [Puberty]

On evenings, I spent the entire study period reading....From that time on, the world began to broaden around me, beyond any tangible limits. The world, as portrayed in those works destined for young people, was divided in two: an ordinary, everyday world, brutal and unresponding to desires, and a spacious, logical world, about all kind, interesting and desirable. Wasn't the very act of reading a pleasure more substantial than that of playing or eating, for instance, even when one was starved?

The butterflies have flown away, like my ignorance and youth.

But I don't know, in the end, what deserts, chasms, achievements, virtues, and beauties have to do with love. We can love for so many different, and paradoxical, qualities in the object of our love--for strength or for weakness, for beauty or for ugliness, for gaiety or for sadness, for sweetness or for bitterness, for goodness or for wickedness, for need or for impervious independence. Then, if we wonder from what secret springs in ourselves gushes our love, our poor brain goes giddy from speculation, and we wonder what is all meaning and worth. Is it our own need that makes us lean toward and wish to succor need, or is it our strength? What way would our strength, if we had it, incline our heart? Do we give love in order to receive love, and even in the transport or endearment carry the usurer's tight-lipped and secret calculation, unacknowledged even by ourselves? Or do we give with an arrogance after all, a passion for self-definition? Or do we simply want a hand, any hand, a human object, to clutch in the dark on the blanket, and fear lies behind everything? Do we want happiness, or is it pain, pain as the index of reality, that we, in the chamber of our heart, want?Oh, if I knew the answer, perhaps then I could feel free.

But sometimes the scars go too deep and the stories are too personal to share.

That night I dreamed about flying turtles and forest fires and fucking the earth...The next morning I awoke and I listened to the tree company tearing away the woods and the timber. I heard the chainsaws ripping outside my open window and I heard the dynamite exploding all the mountain tops away for the black rock below. And instead of feeling sad like I did most mornings, I felt something else now. I found myself saying, 'Explode. Explode you mountains. Rip them down you fuckers. Take this stinking dirt and leave this land with hatred and death.

She smoothes the front of the dress, looking down at her hands, at her bitten fingernails, at her big feet in the pointy-toes shoes. This is a woman's dress, she thinks, a young woman's dress. It is not a girl's dress. It is solidly on the other side of the line outside of girlhood. It is a dress that says something big in a very quiet way; it is a dress that is talking to Alice right now, a dress that is making her feel possibilities never before considered, the possibility of perfume and pretty and dancing and boys. This dress is who she might be, only more so.

He looked along the line of children, exhibits A to C of his existence and heirs to the twisted throne of his corrupt genetics.

Why couldn't she have given him a sultry laugh as she'd seen women do in movies instead of giggling like some enchanted, mindless school girl?

The worst of anything she could do to me would be to make me like her. That's why I ran away.

Goodbye. Goodbye. I can't feel you anymore. The night is almost too beautifully pure for my soul to contain. I walk with my arms spread open under the big fat moon. Heroic weeds rise up from the cracks in the sidewalk, and the colored lights of the Hawaiian Breeze ignite the broken glass in the gutter. Goodbye, I say, goodbye, as I disappear little by little into the middle of the middle of my own spectacular now.

So you__e the little smart ass from Poleglass.__ wanted to point out he sounded like Dr. Seuss but bit my lip and remembered the warning the old lady gave me.

Perhaps friendship doesn't divert sound judgment.

It's in a can. It's good forever.

It__ good if you can accept your life__ou__l noticeYour face has become deranged trying to adjustTo it. Your face thought your life would lookLike your bedroom mirror when you were ten.That was a clear river touched by mountain wind.Even your parents can__ believe how much you__echanged.

But clearly life took people and shook them around until finally they were unrecognizable even to those who had once known them well. Still, there was power in once having known someone.

How stupid that all I have to dois grow two squishy lumps and suddenlyI'm man's best friend