Time didn’t knock.
It barged in
ripping childhood from our fists
like a thief in daylight.
The girls we played tag with?
Now wear gold chains
and bridal sarees,
their mothers whispering,
“Find a good groom before it’s too late.”
The apus who once cursed physics exams
now cradle babies,
their laughter echoing
in kitchens we never entered.
And the vaiyas
those college gods we once feared,
we used to ask,
“How does it feel to be grown?”
Now we know.
And it’s not gentle.
It’s brutal.
It’s fast.
It’s nineteen years old
and already nostalgic.
We used to dream of this age
now we mourn it
before it’s even over.
We blinked.
And the playground turned into
wedding halls.
The group chats turned into
ghost towns.
The selfies turned into
memories we scroll past
but never open.
We are the last breath
of college life.
The final page
before the next chapter
writes itself
without asking.

I remember not too long ago I was just a little boy playing ball in the park it was Little League in the heat and anyone in south Florida will tell you it’s normal and it’s true it really is normal.

Then it began to rain lightning struck the adjacent field and left a **** in right yet somehow for some reason the warning system never sounded its fifteen second alarm I wonder why.

Imagine this:

A crash as loud as if you were wearing a stainless steel stockpot and someone struck it so hard with a stainless steel spoon and soon you were knocked so silly so goofy so discombobulated that you felt like the Liberty Bell the day it rung and cracked during the funeral of Chief Justice John Marshall and you thought you were dead too.

I thought I was a goner so I bolted to safety quick like lightning no pun intended but I didn’t want to be tomorrow's toast.

As the team sat there each about eleven and twelve years old we counted seconds between lighting and thunder light and sound and what we felt were about to be the very last seconds of our young little lives how naïve we were.

One strike cracked so bright it flashed me to today and here I am at twenty-two not dead just yet and I’m not quite sure how or why maybe there’s a purpose maybe there’s a meaning to life it’s such a philosophical thing to sit and contemplate existentialism is such a weird wild thing I think.

I have come to believe that there are multiple reasons for life and one’s to die one’s to survive one’s to figure out every answer to every question and acquiesce all that which satisfies our wants and needs and one’s to love and give and take and share a life and one’s to see all there is to see like cityscapes and oceans and stars and countries one’s to see even more like frowns and births and smiles and deaths and one’s to eat all there is to eat and to drink all there is to drink until we finally figure out a way to accept the inevitable.

Or is the inevitable not inevitable?

What if there’s a way to live forever and there are no consequences extraneous to those of regular everyday life and you can choose to accept the inevitable when you choose to realize that it sure is inevitable?

Ooh! Aah! Ain’t that a concept?

This is not quite what I had in mind at birth I thought it would be smooth sailing between fits of crying and long hours of slumber and meals and short naps and diaper changes and seeing my parents’ faces and those of all others gazing about me in awe and wonder and amazement and pride and love

I was a deity!

Relative to twenty-two years one figures out that being a god is very short-lived and that twenty-two years ain’t very long hardly even a quarter of the way to the brink of a timely death.

Maybe when we’re babies we’re gods and idols?

Well think about this babies can rule the world if only they knew they command the highest of all expenses in the whole of humanity and families and friends willingly shell out money and goods and services for such a tiny little sack of fat and muscle and fastly-forming bones and brains.
Babies are ******* gods.

But gods no less.

My God I wish I could be a baby over again.

But I’m twenty-two and slowly but surely growing old living through each quickening day by day by day and so on and so forth it’s been a fun trip so far and I am sure not done so long as there isn’t another flash of lightning to send me straight to forty-four or eighty-eight—it doubles every time ain’t that a ****** shame?

I could not
for the life of me
see anything
past eighteen.
Upon this earth
a terrible curse -
a true bane
of society.

Five years?
Pah -
The only hope I'd ever had,
was to be alive
in the end.
To see what lies
beyond the bend.

And so came
nineteen

...

and twenty

...

and now,
nearly thirty.

I am still looking
beyond the bend.
By the Gods,
Where does it end?