Growing Up & Drifting Apart

A day before Valentine's Day...but I don't have a valentine.

The second last day of the Lunar New Year...but nothing has changed.

Growing up can be both a good thing and bad thing, but I can only see the pessimistic side of it. Sure, the good part of growing up leaves memories of happy yesterdays, more friendships, gives you more freedom and independence...supposedly. But these optimistic things don't leave as lasting as impression as the negative ones. Positive things come and goes away after its joy is done. Negative things leave a mark and scar behind that is hard to erase and forget. 

Growing up comes with more responsibilities. no wonder they say life is fair in some ways. When you are young, you have the energy and time to do things you want, but you don't have the capital to do so. As a working adult, you have the capital and energy, what you are missing is the time. At the last stage of your life, what you are left with is the capital and the remaining time you have left, bit the lack of energy to do anything or everything. Life gives us fair treatment when it comes to making things hard at every stage of your life. 

Now, I've grown up a bit, to the stage where you are earning some money and a little freedom to do things you want. Just a little independence, my life is still controlled by the people with higher stages in life. So that's the thing. You are doing the things you want, you end up spending more time alone and thinking. You have started working from dawn to dusk, to earn enough capital to grant both your wishes and materialistic wants. You are happy when you get what you want, but in the process of it, you are losing the things that you already have and need. Drifting away from your family and friends as you pursue a goal. Gain a goal, lose a friend. In the midst of your great pursuit, you spent less time in relationships, and then it breaks and fall apart. 

Yup, I've started working. I spent lesser time at home, only to see them at dinner, or if I'm lucky, a glimpse of them in the morning. I can feel the relationship and communication within the family is being strained, with more conflicts, misunderstandings and quarrels, as each of us chase our supposed dreams of life. My friends and I hardly meet up anymore, we hardly even have the time to text each other a simple 'how are you', let alone to reply a message wholeheartedly. 

A single world, a single you, a single life.

Leave it to the fullest, you only live once.

But the simple and inescapable act of growing up destroys it all... ...

Growing Up & Hurting

New Year has come and go.

Even the Lunar New Year has left its mark of red packets, goodies and... sore throats.

Second by second, times flies past.

Days by days, they cannot be unwind.

Months by months, you are always getting older with every breath and step you take.

Age isn't just a number. It is a number that keeps on increasing and doesn't stop. Growing up into independence, into maturity, to be part of a future that one always look forward to. But growing up isn't always a good thing. The older you get, the more responsibilities you have to uphold. You need to be more mature, you cannot show your inner child self. More faults can be placed on you, and you have little or no choice but to shoulder the heavy burden of them.

The older you become, the more things you would have feel and experience. The sweet rainbows of life, the fiery passion of both love and dreams, to the darkest and deepest pits of hurt, failure and remorse. With each experience, we are wounded, healed and then scarred again. Sometimes even before the previous cuts and wounds have been stitched, another has been engraved into your heart, bolder and deeper than before. The older you get the more hurt you face. Your heart has been cut by words and wounded with hurt so much that no matter how much you stitch it back up, it can no longer regain its shape. 

So there sits my heart beating softly and slowly, afraid of the world. A heart, no longer its shape, filled with scars cut too deeply by my very own loved and trusted ones. Beat by beat, its growing tired of stitching itself up. It is growing older and loses power to fight back. A heart, no longer a heart, to feel, to love, to be happy... 

Why grow up only to be hurt?

I don't want to grow up, but hurt still comes my way.