It will slip through your fingers like sand, the energy of your youth. At some point, in your dotage, you’ll hear a song that will remind you of a girl you knew, maybe when your were seventeen, or maybe thirty. You may push it out of your mind for a while; a few decades, and years, and lifetimes, but there it is, waiting for you, in a little-visited dusty corner of your mind, where the cobwebs gather like ghosts. There was once a child in you, in all of us, who struggled against the world, and the limits it set for him, arbitrarily. This child had dreams, and plans for the future, and limitless possibilities. It’s easy to hate this child, with his bright future and idealistic sensibilities. The reflex of old age is to hate such children, to despise their ignorance. But I’ve got a special relationship with the eager beaver behind me. I listen to him, and think about what he wants. There were dreams, and longing, and heartbreaking hopes between fast friends, all but forgotten now, lost in the din of the small worries that mar an adult life.

The only thing that stood in my way then is gone now. I’d do well to remember that.