I feel like the walls of my world are crumbling. As I sit in a corner, staring at the idle dust around my feet, I’m overcome with a feeling of helplessness. Things keep changing, and I can’t stop them.

Friends grow up, and people leave. Some of my closest friends (who are practically family) are leaving for college next year. When we’re so accustomed to seeing each other every day, I have a hard time imagining how I’ll cope when they’re spread all across the country. Seeing each other on holidays, long weekends, is that enough? Is that really enough to feed a relationship? We say we’ll always be friends and that things will stay the same, but sometimes it seems like we’re just kidding ourselves. We lie to each other as we promise five page letters and phone calls twice a week. Will we really become ‘too busy’ to answer each other’s emails, and will it come to cheap greeting cards at Christmas? And what happens when we’ve all graduated, and move into the real world? We’ll make fabulous new friends with perfectly gleaming careers like our own, drawn into the great scheme of corporate America. We’ll forget all about the small-town sidekicks we grew up with, only to see one of them on the news fifteen years later, their movie-debut dominating at the box office.

Families break apart and reform. New families that is, the old ones are never good enough. As my neighbor tries best to adapt to this new lifestyle, one heavily proposed by the media, I can’t help but realize that she has become ‘a child of divorce’. No longer a happy teenybopper, she has morphed into a moody teenager. Unable to understand the dysfunction, her plan seems to be to spend as little time at home as possible, wherever that home may be. As parents battle over ‘ownership rights’, neither seem willing to take responsibility. Both fail to notice their daughter’s demise, and it frustrates me to see her suffer. Before someone can point her home, she needs to know where that is. But as parents jet back and forth arguing and complaining about one another, this new lifestyle seems frivolous.


Peace and love,
jem.