When You Grow Up

I often find myself thinking "Ah, to be so young again." when I see people playing Counter-Strike: Source with me.  Many of the players are between ten and fifteen years old.  I wonder how they would react to a forcast of how their next five to ten years will play out.  It would go a little something like this:

So, you're twelve, huh?  Well, I know it may not seem like it, but the next eight years of your life are going to fly by.  Time may not appear to be flying for you at the moment in the sixth grade, but it soon will.  It only gets faster.  Your life only speeds up, even if you find you are doing less than you used to.  You will soon graduate from middle school, and you will be glad you have.  At this point in your life, everyone older appears to be against you.  Many are.  Most are not.

Once you become a freshman in high school, you'll have an awkward year.  You will love the freedom that a high school offers compared to what you knew before.  You will make new friends, even if you don't try.  Your freshman year will go by quite fast.  When summer comes, you'll think back on your previous year and you'll think about how you enjoyed it.  The next two years you will feel like you are really part of the ownership of the school.  You won't feel like a targeted freshman anymore.  It's your territory now.  These are to be your last two fully enjoyable years, but you won't see that yet.

Your senior year will be different somehow.  You're barely older than you were before, but there is no longer any group of people there that have been around longer (except for staff).  It's truely your school now.  The first semester of this year will fly faster than you even imagined possible over the summer.  When you come back after Christmas, you will start to feel the end coming closer, but it won't be until the last month of the semester that you truely feel the urgency of a major change in your life.  By now you will have experienced death almost surely.  It probably won't be anyone you knew very well, but it will probably be somebody you at least met.  You'll begin to realize that you aren't immortal.  This isn't to say you couldn't comprehend that it was possible to die before, but you just never really imagined it was possible.

You'll be sad at graduation, but the summer will go pretty smoothly.  The only catch is when your friends start to leave before you.  You won't be hanging out with them anymore.  You will miss them dearly for months.  You'll eventually get over this, but it will take many years.  You probably won't ever fully get over the shift.  You are no longer around everyone you came to know and love to talk to every day for eight hours.  You will struggle to fill the void left by this seperation.  Nothing will seem to do it:  food, alcohol, new friends, sex, concerts, gaming...nothing really takes the place of the strong bond you had and that feeling in your heart.

Right now you don't even think about it.  All of this will numb you.  You won't feel the holidays or seasons anymore.  You can't "feel" Christmas as a special time.  Sure, you can decorate a tree or dress up, but that does little to establish that warm feeling you used to have as a kid.  Everything just somehow feels less interesting.

Enjoy it while you've got it.  I keep waiting for the respawn, but I know it will never happen.  Here is the curse.  Once you're old enough to realize that what I've said is even remotely true, it will have already all have happened.  You won't believe me now.  You can't.  I don't expect you to.  The futility of knowledge and experience...it's ironic in a way.

But, there's no time for this now.  You've got a flag to capture...a zombie to kill...a mission to complete.  Go for it.







Life is a sad reality.  Things never quite work out as you've planned, do they?