A piece by Sammi Yorn

What ever happened to the moments I was mesmerized by breaking the laws of how I’d been taught to act?

It once was a rush to the head, a signal that I was not merely watching life go by. The hours that I was going places I shouldn’t have, was exhilarating at first. I was breaking out, nodding my head and not turning it over my shoulder, looking up with wild eyes to a sky instead of a wall. It’s called living, they told me, when I asked what that pounding throughout my body was.

I realize now that the deprivation of this so called, moments of uncatchable youth, fed me. I also realized that I was not taught by everyone to follow the rules, I was taught to break them in the most poetically inspirational of ways. I was supposed to write in my diary that I felt like an actual human being for the first time in my short life, and the memories were supposed to stay ingrained so I could look back at them when I was old and had nothing left to remember but the days where I could feel my heart beating in my chest loudly. We were supposed to be merely bodies running on wet grass at midnight, high on the adrenaline of acting out. We were supposed to live embracing the only way we could create art at our age : to romantically talk about the noise we made.

Instead, it felt sickening. Not in the physical sense, but in the way where your brain feels defeated and you punish yourself for overanalyzing things, even though you know you can’t stop.

Does it make me a traitor to youth? To a generation that expects me to voice these things through the words and art I make? In the unfinished songs I try and write? I didn’t like stumbling on the pavement in the early hours of the morning trying to catch my breath because I’d been running on a fuel that passed all too quickly through me. It left with me with a lump in my throat that appeared and never left. The music still thumped loudly with every step I took towards sanity. The smell on my shirt lingered. The feeling of his hands in my hair stayed too.

They all said the same things.

It’s supposed to feel sickening.

It’s supposed to be fun.