Diana Darby ** "I V" ** Intravenous

When You Are Young

When you are young
you think you have all the time in the world.
There is always tomorrow,
one more t.v. show to watch,
one more errand,
one more dream,
one more dip in the pool.
There is time
to let parents and teachers and boyfriends upset you.
There is time for tears
and anger
and hopes fading.
It doesn’t matter if tonight is spent in front of the t.v.
mulling over why he didn’t call.
There is still plenty of time.
And if a song doesn’t come today,
it will come tomorrow
so you stop trying as hard as you would have if you thought
there wouldn’t be a tomorrow.
When you are young
minutes move like hours
and you have time to stop and smell the daisies
and marvel at your breasts as they make their first appearance like
shy debutantes.
When you are young your heart is as open as a butterfly’s wings
and you do not know the sting of betrayal.
But when you get older something happens.
You start to see how you have spent your years
and you start to worry that the hours and days are moving too fast.
You see your life projected on the wall like a strange mosaic tile,
cracked and fragmented and uneventful
and you wonder how you can stop doing what it is you’ve been doing
and start doing something different.
You grow tired of grilled cheese sandwiches and the same Christmas songs
and running to the mall to buy something that really won’t make you happy
for more than a few weeks.
Oreos and ice cream make you sick and you realize sugar is
a poison you’ve swallowed all you life.
You start looking at babies and old people
and realizing you are neither
but somewhere in the middle.
You start wondering what we are all doing
here
on this planet
always moving,
moving.
You start seeing the illusion of the world you are living in
as if it were a cardboard cut-out,
a good wind could blow over.
And you realize how empty it all is -
The pursuit of money, cars
and homes.
And you start asking yourself
how this whole lie began
and how you can get out of it
and find what you are supposed to be doing and thinking
and wanting
before it is too late
and you are too old
to care.