Each dawning breath, drawn out cold and slow on november mornings. Where bodies forget central heating and, instead, warm skin on skin forges frost on the window pane. Yearning, begging for knowledge, but not the history of Marxism; ancient mysteries unfolding through pages of opened tabs, reading aloud what "adults" have come to know one way or another over the years. In these morning hours, with plastic tables and fluorescent lighting, I have seen so many figures of journalism turnover that my mind has began to lose any coherent concept of monetary value. Wikipedia has taught me more than nine thousand pounds worth of institutionalised learning.
On these mornings, a haven of white cotton and eyes forced shut trying to slow the ticking of the clock. A smile that contorts my face unwillingly, a growing in my core so full of something that it begs to burst from my chest into the open air. I forget, at times, what it's like to write these feelings down - how saying it out loud reawakens the chemical war as though it were some forbidden pagen curse.
It's hard to put down in tangiable form, to write something which can't be explained in spoken word - because no combination of twenty six letters can accurately depict these chemicals. These watercolour, lucid dream of hormones that heighten our world and dilute teenage angst with adult wisdom.
The world is new to us, it is unconquered, undiscovered and, in these years, accessible only by a wanderlust that makes our bones ache. Before the strings of family tie us to the land and grow roots deep into a place we will learn to call home. Trees that become part of our memories, that feature in the fairy tales of our child's imagination and ones they will associate with the nostalgia of their youth.
A part of my mind lingers on questions that won't be answered in any comprehensible space of time... Whether my children will discover words that can permeate the complexities inside their veins. If they too will wake, heavy from dreaming, and reach across to scribble unintellible words that will one day make their throat ache with memories of a forgotten place. Of places that exist as distinguishable memories, but both far from alike in worldy reality. I hope I remember to ease them into these worlds with the same kind words my mother did. To think about all the lovely things they have done during the day, as through this in itself was enough to pull down all the stars in the sky, right into that very room. As we grow, we stop fearing the monsters under our beds; instead, we learn they exist in the minds of strangers we have yet to meet.
I hope to not lose sight of what matters in the end- when we look back on youth as a forgotten journal, of words that gather dust until they are brought back to life. That we will explore those corners of the planet we dreamt of when out bodies were young and fresh, and before life has time to corrode our bones. That, in the grand scale of life, work was just a means of funding the adventures, passing the time and, on hard days, a respite from our little monsters. That we write words on paper, to secure our ever-growing mass of chemicals, and make real the memories of a muscle the size of a clenched fist- over a lifetime. I hope I remember what it feels like to be this alive.
