Late last night

Teenagers love, relish, flourish in adopting dark overtones. They take photos of themselves in two hundred year old cemeteries wearing as much black as their young skin can hold, and tiptoe on tiny slippered (or heavily combat-booted) feet behind the rod iron gates after dark. I know I did it.

I think it's because they feel so far removed from death (usually). It seems an eternity away and they probably haven't seen too much of it save an ancient great grandmother or two. It's not their world yet. Octegenarians don't parade about maudlinly for fun, their sadness is real and their black garb is brought out in real mourning, the mourning of what really is as opposed to the beauty of the night. They are all too familiar with the inside of a cemetery.

But teenagers, oh...what they loathe the most is not to be included in something. They invite themselves in and fall into all that is dark, foreign, and draped in black. The closer I get to growing older, seeing my parents grow older, seeing peers and seemingly immortal relatives start to join the legions on the other side of the Universe the less I have in common with the vampish eighteen year old I used to be. Black is still worn because it's easy, and slimming, stylish...but no longer do I spend too much time thinking about the dark things in life. When we start to see our clock ticking along quite quickly, the more we perhaps want to chase out all the darkness and fill it with as much sunshine as we can handle.

Ours

When we are children we throw tantrums, someone has taken away a toy and we want it and it's not fair, why should they have it and not us?

And when we are in that awkward in-between we pout in our rooms, when someone changes alliances and no longer wants our company during twenty minute lunches in sweaty cafeterias. How dare they take them away, it's not fair, why should they have it and not us?

We grow older and longer, and are doing just fine with another, and then someone takes away that another or they take themselves away. How dare they go away, it's not fair, why should someone else have them and not us?

And then we're quite old (or in the very sad instances not so old), someone goes far far away that's been with us for what seems like forever and not long enough at the same time. How dare they go away? It's not fair, why should someone else have them, why should their bodies be gone, with nothing but maybe ashes left behind?

I'm beginning to think these small things are practice: a toy, a friend, a lover, a partner, a parent. To prepare us for the deepest and rawest losses we'll face. Luckily grief and loss have only visited my doorstep in the most expected ways, and maybe I'll go back and read this when it does visit me properly and I won't throw the computer down the stairs.