Eighteen

For the ones who are living out their eighteen during the pandemic.

I might have taken the privilege to make this relatable to a very few number of people, mostly my friends and people my age.

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Over the cobwebs woven over my dad's old bicycle and the cracked wall, I liked to sprinkle dust and sand and watch them stick over the grand tapestry, like an universe with spider spit for space and time for, well - time.

Sometimes i would spray water, and watch in amusement at the dew drops hanging like an elaborate chandelier. Sometimes i would drown my universe in too much water and it would all fall down - my make believe stars and their tiny, make believe planets.

Of course I would then proceed to climb the sunshade over the window in my grandma's room and hide until my mother forgets about the mess I made over my dad's old rusting bicycle.

That was a time of pigtails, training wheels and show-and-tell speeches. Times when I would walk to the bathroom and stand on tip-toes only to see the top of my head. I would see the sun with bare naked eyes just to spite the ones who told me not to and spend hours blinking with blinded vision.

And it seems, it becomes increasingly closer, and closer - the things that we were all oblivious in our childhood. Things that creep up as we scroll along the digital minefield in our hands, things that might not have been present to us so jarringly when we were seven and drawing dogs on the playground sand. With the world nearer and nearer - we are knit, like lints over yarn- we are woven, pulled and pushed together.

At birth we are given predetermined choices for a lifetime and at adolescence we decide a little of the next three decades or more if we are lucky; with our minds ambitious and brave from ignorance. And we grow and we grow, painting pictures from pain and passion, reading corpses of trees tattooed with the thoughts of the dead when they lived.

We laugh at the depths our mind wanders to at nights, we laugh at the dance of death and life, decay and growth around us.

Our humor scattered and our hearts lonely but strangely connected in the misery.

We are children at our hearts still, and children always. The dark still scares us and the strange things that we don't know daunts us.

At eighteen, a century ago, some of us would have been married, some of us sent to war, and maybe some of us doing odd jobs at our hometown - never having seen the seas or the mountains.

At eighteen we are now exposed. Our eyes devour the information, and no matter who we are and what we do, the truth of things chase us down and settle themselves into our minds. And at eighteen, a century from now, we would wish to have been born during the infancy of the world wide web.

At fifteen i used to scream so loud, talk so sure and demand attention. Bite back for every insult and draw my boundaries with explosives.

"Why are we letting this happen?"

"How can you sit still at a time like this?"

And as time went, I realized time rips things apart and puts some back as it goes. There will never be a time when we can sit still. Not as long as we are alive.

There will always be chaos, there will always be injustice - there will always be something to fight for. In a way, it was both an optimistic and a depressing thought.

At fifteen a self-declared activist in the making, and at eighteen I was exhausted by it all. Things that pushed me to make myself heard in every social media there is, now make me sit and reflect silently.

What did I know then? What do I know now? What would I know in another few years?

In the grand scheme of things, nothing much at all.

We burn so quick and so fast, and quiet down before we even begin our lives. Maybe we are fated like our universe, to have fury and fire that burns gloriously for the first few fractions of our life and then to have an eternity adorned with black holes and nothingness.

For someone who used to be so fiercely opinionated, I bite back my words now, I take down all the things my younger self said, messily cleaning up my digital fingerprint.

Maybe that is growth, or maybe I will learn to speak freely again.

All of us will change and leave behind snakeskins of old friends and workplaces. And as we change, the memories will stain the insides of our minds. As time churns forward, we are hurled and we hit ourselves against other things that are equally bound by the clutch of its tides and change irrevocably.

It is as things are meant to be.

Change is certain to happen. We can sit and use the present to ponder upon the past. We can keep trying to wish ourselves back to when things were supposedly simple. Or we can cast our eyes to the now, see the now as it is, like we did when we were seven and didn't have much of a past to look back to.

To live in the present and to not let the giant ripples of change time creates over the universe drown us is the best we can do.

Eighteen is barely a life lived for a human and by the scales not made for humans- an insignificant fraction of a blink of time. At eighteen we live, our first year as an adult in isolation and in virtual classrooms. Even if everything from years to age is just a construct we made to pacify ourselves and our need to belong.

In a way, for those of us privileged enough to be isolated now - there has never been a greater opportunity.

At eighteen we are now sitting at our homes and thinking of our future and past - replaying memories and discovering fascinatingly trivial things about ourselves and the things around us.

To have our lives slow down enough for us to fully and in a way, painfully feel the time slipping past us is truly a gift. At the brink of a new phase, at the beginning of the complete death of our childhood and the sudden absence of the crutches that we were provided by society in its excuse, we have now the time in our hands to say goodbye to things that we no longer need, and the things that will be with us for this new phase of our lives.

This is the time of our lives that we were told would speed past us. And we are lucky to have a fraction of it slow down for us to heal and begin again new vigor, whenever time decides to let us go back to our fast-paced lives again.