I'd rather witness one tiger deftly stalking their target than to watch two dozen of you drinking yourselves *******.

Pastel houses,
carousel mouses.
Culture clashes in tourist-reliant suburban wastelands.

Toxic aftermath pouring out of performers' hands as everyone claps.

This is what I grew up in.

These streets are full of magic.
The kind that seeps from grand dreams seen to fruition.
The kind that charges tuition on the merits of your madness.
The kind where failed ambition sleeps in back alleys,
feeding off forgotten sadness.

The first five days:
a whirlwind of old friends in new surroundings,
indulging in old habits with the occasional mumblings of,
"I'm proud of you man,
this is nice."

On day six, back in the stix.
Kicking it with the fams up to their same old tricks.

It's hard to say where my heart is.
I've always suffered from being adventurer-sick.

All I know is that the planets have finally aligned in such a way as
to allow me to walk down the streets I grew up on in the way that I haven't done in such a long time,
the way in which I learned all their names.
The way I grew up attempting to escape their grasp.

Now here I am, for the first time in years,
rehashing the past
and its dreams,
and its tears.

As do boats.
As do bodies lying in moats
surrounding castles' fortified walls.

Hope mopes.
Waiting in line at the airport to be cleared through customs,
unaware that it is itself contraband.

Hope is for dopes.
Every man is an island.

Some haven't developed proper ports yet.

So you found yourself in over your head.
Bit off more than you could chew.
Stretched yourself a little too thin,
then what did you do?

Sent out a veiled cry-for-help to a friend,
knowing full well it was a torpedo.

Sometimes all you need to admit that you're uncharacteristically cool with all of this is a bit of liquid courage and a pinch of frustrated madness swished around until you're sarcastically committing to loving the **** out of your current situation with a vague suspicion that you're not actually being ironic.

Disillusioned youth all drunk on ideas of change,
passing around their ideals until we all felt the same,
or felt better about not feeling the same,
or felt normal by being surrounded by people even farther from normal than we'd ever claim to be ourselves,
or felt like we were in a safe space for the first time in our lives,
a space in which we could actually be ourselves,
or felt as if the weight of the world thrusted on our shoulders by our parents was no longer a burden we had to bear alone,
or felt sane enough for the first time in awhile to recognize how much we'd actually grown,
to have sorted out all of the ******* from the things we'd always claimed to have known.

God bless 'em, every one.

Oh, how we've grown.