My building has at least two adolescent girls on each floor. Seriously, it’s like someone dropped a bomb here and only girls came out of it; boys would feel very uncomfortable in this building. Anyway, there is this particular girl downstairs that makes me shiver when I see her and the gang she is hanging out with. She is extremely pretty and of course, as any beautiful teenage girl at seventeen, very full of herself.
Tonight, after seeing her, with her usual crowd, at the corner of the street (ten weird looking guys and four even weirder looking girls), she made me think about my own teen years and oh my God how I don’t miss them. For some years now, ever since the calm of matureness hit me, I have condemned teenagers as being diseased by the most horrible and uncontrollable disease of them all. I began looking around at the drama and struggle the “ill” are suffering from and their barbaric way of trying to proclaim their freedom, ignoring ours. I used to think, horrified, that I was one of them once and that, maybe, my ways were as outrageous and useless as theirs. Sometimes, I used to believe I could understand them and consoled myself with the idea that the cure for their illness is time and a lot of patience.
But there is a trick to this disease that never comes back to us; it is the most beautiful and horrible thing your body and mind experiences in the same time. Ignoring its existence when we are cured, leads to hypocrisy and denying its involvement on the later on mature adult. Adolescence brings your first crazy love chills; “she” reddens your cheeks when you hold hands for the first time, “she” gives you a taste of pain in the most brutal way possible and “she” is the one who gives you unimaginable powers to fight for what you need or want. The side effects, useless and violent sometimes, are everything that we condemn and hate later on, most likely to forget about ourselves and our long forgotten dreams.
The adolescent hidden inside us, chained and forgotten, screams and writhes of pain every time we burry ourselves in the ordinary. Let’s give him a little bit of freedom and let him fight for us and our “useless” dramas.
