I have always wanted to stare the death of my youth in its face and now that I am looking down the barrel, I cannot recollect what it is that I had so much to say back then. Staring back at the faded pencil on the fragile nicotine-stained paper, I try to memorize what those smudged lines what once meant to me.

Those pages hold their place on my burdened bookshelves, full of words I have never read nor care to revisit. I keep books that I haven’t read and give away the ones that don’t mean a damn to me.

I want a bound book with my name on it. I want to be a novelist but I chastise myself for having no plot, no strategy in life. These handwritten musing hold little court for greatness; one needs an editor. Teenager sorrows are plenty and now as an adult, I feel my peers and I are all struggling for the next rung. Things have not changed so I leave those unread words for rainy days that have past and have yet to come.

If I wrote in red ink now, it’d be a pen and not my blood. It was good to be unaffected, but if only for a minute. I thought I was different, I thought I’d be no different, but even as so much I have not changed, I still view my contaminated world through an altered lens. I cannot cross out the mistakes in my life, there is no backspace, no CNRL+ALT+DEL in the real world. I cannot ‘photoshop’ the flaws out of my memory.

If I had to rewrite what I wrote then, I wonder what I would paraphrase about my past, my permutations, my permanence and my past. Would I be able to explain the frustration of my self? Would I card catalogue and cross-reference my miseries?