Act Your Age

What is life?


Life is the arduous process of learning everything you need to know, promptly unlearning it all, and then learning everything again.


Over and over and over.


A kid is taught in his youth that stealing is wrong: he obediently accepts the fact. As a brash adolescent, he unlearns what he took for gospel in his youth and steals a banker's yacht. Karma smiles wickedly and sits him behind bars for nine months to start relearning what he already knew. He learns. Years later, unlearns. And later yet, learns again.


Over and over and over.


When you're young, there's always someone there. They stand beside you as you try to ride without training wheels, encouraging and praising, even when you pitch yourself face-first into the sidewalk. As a child, you simply assume that they will stay where they are, praise spilling from their lips without cease, from the moment you awaken to the moment you rest. It's common knowledge, isn't it? That someone will guide you where you need to go.


Childhood is pleasant in that way. It seems to roll on forever in the safe confines of an adult's watchful gaze, guided by fool-proof walls of "Just let mommy help you with that." and "No, no sweetie. This way, over here." A cradle-like prison, the cage of an zoo animal content to eat their portion and curl against the bars to sleep. Rules are rules, and that's final.


But foolish as we are, tempted to idiocy by the mocking voice of budding independence, we slowly decide that rules are, in fact, not rules. The beast's eyes open wide and he is suddenly gripped by a claustrophobia for his gilded cage.


It is at this point, the crossroads between child and adult, that awkward interim in every life wherein adulthood is suddenly within reach, yet childhood remains clasped against us. It is at this point that the things we knew as certainty mere moments ago become stale, useless memories. All is unlearned: discarded.


In the place of rules provided by guardians, child-like curiosity returns and invites us to do what we should know is wrong. We endanger ourselves in "grown-up" equalities of putting one's finger in a glowing flame or running blind into a busy road. But unlike childhood, adolescence is not barred by the protection of authority. Our actions are our own, as a result of that nearby, yet unreachable maturity, and as such the consequences are our own as well.


It would be comforting to say that this stage is a tiny blip in our life spans, but it isn't. Stupid adolescence can continue for years and years. And even when it ends, the stupidity will come again. Perhaps with another name, in another form, but that desire to forget all that you have learned will return without a doubt. That's just how it goes.


Sunlight beats hot on my head as Sol finally slips past the chestnut tree on his way to the western horizon. The blackness of my thick coat soaks up the white heat like a thirsty dog, dumping what it gathers on the leaden body beneath.


I sink further into my huddled position against the chestnut's trunk, willing the earth to swallow me so that I might escape the heat. I should stand and find a cooler spot to sit. I should shed my unseasonable coat. I should return home, to the comfort of a frigid basement. I should do any one of these things, but I do none. The thought of moving in this awful, intoxicating, oppressive hotness makes me cringe. So I remain curled in on myself, sweating like a pig. Stupid. Stubborn.


My sun-dazzled gaze roams the tiny green area that I'm temporarily trapped in.


The chestnuts that line the cracked walkway are too big for this excuse of a park. They look wildly majestic and out of place against the background of a mom-and-pop shop infested street. The grass is thin and weak from being trampled by the indefinable throngs of businessmen and trendy youngsters that congest this area daily. Trodden, dusty paths are carved mercilessly through the dying grass; providing people with "short cuts" to pass through the miniscule park with what they perceive to be greater ease.


Once, there were flower beds placed carefully among the towering chestnuts, home to aromatic night stocks, elegant lilies, crawling lilac bushes, dainty summersweet, and the occasional shyly hidden violet. They were scattered unprofessionally together in their little boxes of sod; almost untamed in their progression, slowly crawling over the wooden border of their realm. The park had been different then, filled with the amateur colour and vitality of innocent flowers, quivering in the wind against protective chestnut trunks. It had made me happy to see the chestnuts with a friend, I had always thought them so lonely in their stoic misplacement, but with the flowers brushing gently against them, I'd felt content.


My mind drifts happily back in time as the heat on my head is slowly forgotten and the stuffy warmth of my coat seduces me; allowing me to slip in and out of almost-consciousness.


I realize that nostalgia colours most things in a presumptuous, rosy shade, but even knowing that cannot make my memories of the park any less idyllic. My father had come with me often then, to share our fleeting moments together in the pretend isolation of a blatantly public area. As a child I had assumed that when my father and I went to the park, everyone else was obligated to leave us be. That somehow our moments together mattered to the world.


He had knelt with me among the delicate flowers and named them each. A violet. A tiger lily. A honeysuckle. A wild rose. He'd point to one and tell me a little secret, something special and important that no one else knew. You can sip the nectar of a twinberry blossom by plucking the petals from the stem. Ladyslippers got their name from a Cinderella story. At night, fairies hide themselves away inside the foxgloves. And on and on.


At the time, everything he told me seemed so very important. I held on to each piece of information carelessly tossed my way as if there would be an exam to complete at the day's close. Although the test never came, I still clung to the stories and tidbits with an obsessive need closing in on hysteria. Even now, many of the throwaway comments my father murmured to me in the park repeat solemnly in my head, as if on cue, the moment my eye grazes a tulip or a virginia creeper.


I shaped my childhood around those fairy tales. All the little rules of being a kid were peppered with fairy stories to keep them in my mind. Elves and other woodland tricksters appeared amidst the playground pipes; teasing me to chase them round and round the metallic jungle until I fell dizzy in the sand. Scary shadows of trolls and werewolves lurked where I could not go, forcing me from the temptation of a romp through the dark night-time alleyways.


Life was so black and white back then. Do what mother and father said. Don't go anywhere alone. Lying is bad. Listen to you teachers. Eat your peas. And don't go near the trolls.


That was it.


That was the entire world.


A sudden wave of nausea rolls over me, knocking my senses back to attention. I pull myself up a bit from my uncomfortably slouched position against the tree, pushing my back hard into the trunk to ease the sore feeling there. The sun is still on his slow path across the sky sending waves of slow, thundering fire on the world. And more specifically, on me.


I finally find the energy, or perhaps the confidence, to shy from the sunlight. With all the grace of a sedated seal, I pull myself across the ground to lie in the dancing shadow of chestnut leaves. Rough, pathetic grass brushes against my cheek and I consider keeping my face away from the undoubtedly filthy ground. "Get your mouth away from that! People walk all over that grass you know!!" Mother would cry. I picture her running through the park to pull me from the offensive soil with a glare; all reprimands and jabbering.


But she's not there. She doesn't run over and scream. She doesn't toss me back from the threat of certain death crawling quietly in the dirty park soil. That's my job now.


But I don't lift my head.


Keeping my mouth away from the ground was her rule. I learned that when I was a kid, and at the moment, I'm in the process of unlearning all that stuff. So I keep my head where it is, poised dangerously close to ground made of pure sickness.


Nothing is black and white anymore, although I sometimes wish it was. Everything is an infuriating shade of grey. There aren't specifically "bad" people. There aren't specifically "good" people. Nothing is certain. Nothing is law.


In childhood, rules are rules. Sure you break them sometimes, but even when you're going against them you still know that they're the rules. That you should be following them.


When you get older, that seems to change.


At some point, not any time specifically, the rules cease to be... rules. They aren't law anymore. It's like they turn into suggestions of how one should act, but it's not really necessary if you don't want to.


People still get mad when you break them: they still yell and make a scene. But once you decide the rules aren't rules, you've got the upper hand. They can yell and scream all they want but you don't feel bad anymore; you don't feel like you've done anything wrong. It's not like the rules mattered anyway. Only little kids listen to rules.


And you're no little kid. You're an adult; so why should any other adult get to boss you around?


It's unfair.


So you stop listening to them when they scream, and you try to come up with your own rules. You go into society like you never have before; completely naked, defenceless. Pathetic as a newborn kitten. And you try to see the world for yourself: so you can make rules that matter.


It's a difficult process. Everyone does it their own way because, like I said, there are supposed to be no rules. And yet...


I shift my gaze up from the ground to glance at Haley Robertson as she passes through the little park.


She's decked out in barely enough fabric to make up a napkin: ultra-short-short shorts with a polka dot bikini top for a shirt. The shorts show off so much leg that it seems pointless to be wearing pants at all, and the only reason the bikini top is decent is because she's still as flat as a board. Some of the boys from school are crowded around her laughing and fooling about in the idiotic parody of a family-friendly sitcom; following her with leftover elementary trepidation coupled with some sort of clumsy attraction.


I grimace inwardly at the sight.


The rules are of different variety anymore. Childhood rules are black and white: easy to read. Don't do this, do that, come here, go there. That sort of thing. It's a positive or a negative, defined, understandable, no jargon.


Adolescent rules are grey.


They exist, and are hugely important at that, but they have no definition. Sometimes something is wrong, but other times it's right. Some people are "good" for some people and "bad" for others, while some people are just "bad" for everyone. Certain topics are okay to talk about, while others should never be mentioned, except by some people. A place can be off limits to a certain group but to another it's the prime destination. Sometimes an activity is something only one or two can do, and no one else is allowed. Or sometimes everyone has to do something, even if they don't want to. But none of these things are ever to be said out loud.


Ironically, the rules adolescence create while running from rules is the most complex law system in the world.


I rip a handful of dying grass out absently as I observe Haley and her harem standing idly at the far end of the park. She's simpering laughingly as one of the boys throws himself dramatically over the railing above the beach only to swing back up from the other side in acrobatic manoeuvre; like a monkey that forgot how to hold onto a branch. There are other girls in the group but they don't matter: it's common knowledge. They're just there to worship the ground Haley, most golden of idols, walks upon.


Megan is crowded up against Haley's right side, smiling and giggling along with the group, but keeping a meticulous watch on how close she is to her deity. I knew Megan back in elementary, we used to be very close friends. We lived on the same street so most days we were at one another's houses, playing, talking, annoying the parents; the usual kid stuff. I still have clear memories of those times, but once in a while I feel like I should forget all about her.


Those rosy hours are just memories of a friend lost forever. I liked Megan a lot when I was a kid, in the black and white days, but I'd never want to know her now.


If she could melt into Haley right this instant, I'm pretty sure she would try. She's so close to her that they look like one unanimous blob: Megan all admiration and dependence, Haley complete self-important indifference. It's disgusting. Seeing my old friend so... so weak.


I fight the urge run over there and smack a bunch of sense into all of them; to scream and shout and call them all idiots: self-centred, ridiculous idiots. I can't do that, it's against the rules. It's against the rules to even go up to them; well, for me at least.


The rules are grey, and I'm stuck in right in the middle of all of that greyness. I'm one of those people to whom the rules apply in abundance, yet to whom the rules are never explained. Those who the rules centre around are in another world than I, yet close enough to punish me if I break their law. That's just how it goes.


When you're young, your parents are the ones who guide you and teach you, they are your influence,. The kids that you surround yourself with are just a nameless horde of companions, with faces and personalities, but you don't think too much about them. They are just the ones to grab your dirty hand with theirs, and drag you away to the sand and the sweat of a fantastic paradise.


But, as always, nothing stays the same for very long. Your parents influence fades away, or at least pales beyond recognition, but the freedom that you'd hoped for doesn't take its place. Instead this new power from some unknown source worms its way into existence and takes root with fervour.


Authority was always something that the adults had, standing on high with a whip and chain handed to them by some god that was just too big for you to understand. Their authority chafed on occasion, but it was fair. That indescribable god that had too made the chasm between the young and the old had given them that power; so it was fine. But as their rules are slowly unlearned, so too is their divine right.


Now a new god has emerged, as unknown and omnipotent as the last, but the power he hands to mortals is given instead to the ignorant, to the foolish, to the arrogant. To adolescence. This handing down of nameless power seems less fair than it was before. It seems random and blind, like the god simply tossed the power about with his eyes shut tight. Those who are charmed with the ethereal whip and chain are no different than those they govern: no better, no wiser. Luck is the only virtue that sets them apart.


The whip shines golden at Haley's hip, blending into the light that draws her worshippers like moths. She has been granted the title of slave driver, she is one of those that the light of power radiates from. Like the sun, fire and white heat roll of her in waves, drawing her sunflower peers to turn their faces to that divinely blessed one, hoping to gather up her stray light for themselves.


Power trickles down through osmosis: the closer you are to the sun the more light you create. Some of us, like Megan, crowd to that source of power and authority, perhaps in a final desperate search for that freedom we dreamed of. Freedom through authority. But how close you get isn't up to you, the slave driver makes the decisions. If you're "lucky", the sun will bring you near so that you might bask in discarded warmth, be looked upon as well, if only by peripheral vision.


Most of us aren't lucky. Some of us have a little bit more luck than others, but most of us don't have very much at all. Most of us end up fidgeting on the fringes of sunlight, catching glimpses of the shining whip with envy, our heads following the light against our will.


I refused to follow like a beaten dog, trudging half-heatedly along; I refused to be Haley's subject. I turned from them and deemed them dead. And, for a little interval, I truly believed that this would grant me freedom, lonely, dark freedom. But I was mistaken.


Refusing to bend to the whip does not make you immune to it, it makes the whip sting more. Because I did not submit to the divine power of authority, the slave drivers simply outlawed me. Banished and ostracized me; flicking the whip should I dare to enter their ranks again.


This new authority (and for me, this new abuse) is what shapes us. How close we are to the sun is what writes our laws and picks our friends. We are no longer free to choose from a generic mass of children, to scamper off to the playground in sightless bliss with others, common perhaps only by age. We must stay within the circle that we are assigned to. And in that group you must be what is expected of you by your colleagues, or you risk being pushed from them and back, farther from the sun still.


In this way, the whip and chain shapes us all as they will. And in our newly altered forms, we alter one another for the comfort of ourselves in the painful progression of unlearning reality.


I don't dream of trolls and fairies anymore. Their grins do not catch my eye in shadow of shy violets and flamboyant lilies. Running from the shapes of wicked things no longer leads me from the dangerous unknown.


I am new, I suppose. I am completely my own, I suppose. And yet... with all this new authority, I feel more powerless than before.


The sun has shifted yet again, chasing me into my den of soft shadows. Light spreads across my back in little streams of comforting discomfort, burning and soothing all at once. I lift my eyes back to the place where Haley stood, and I find it empty. My black coat latches on to the sunlight predictably and attempts to suffocate me with heat made tenfold by the fabric.


It comes to me once more, that I should move and save myself from the seductive pain. My back is sore from lying on the ground, and my face is smudged by hateful dirt. A breeze pulls through the park and picks up sickly sweet scents of garbage and stale urine, when once it would have caught on lovely night stocks. The heat of midday is rocking me into a drunken coma that I know I should avoid, but it's hard to deny the sun.


Move, I tell myself, escape the heat. But the demand falls on deaf ears. As before, I do nothing.

Understanding

         Although I am not nearly as skilled as Golding, I attempted to replicate his symbolic style in this piece. Most things mentioned in the story have a double meaning that is symbolically related to the  transformation of the narrator as she considers the shift in influence from childhood to adolescence. One of the most important ideas present in the story is the gap between children and adults, their understanding of life, and how difficult it is to become acquainted with the world as an individual. In my opinion, adolescence is a very painful period in a person's life. It is the time when, being finally left to stand alone, you and your peers revert back to something of a primal state in search of wisdom and understanding. The awkward years of adolescence are perhaps the time in life when people are at their most primitive, because they are trying to learn about society and the world, but they do not have the experience to function anywhere above the lowest common denominator. This concept is also very present in Lord of the Flies. The children that are on the island, isolated from the option of turning to adults for guidance, revert back to a basic, primal state. They do this in the search of a set of laws, in search of an authority to live by, and, seeing how they are too young to truly understand the world, the only authority they can conjure is a primitive one. Just as the protagonist of my story is baffled by the violent shift in authority and the nakedness of independence, so too are the characters of Lord of the Flies thrown by the heaviness of responsibility and wisdom. The two stories share a common response to "What is the influence of others on oneself?", both say that those who surround us shape us to fit into their conglomerate system. The characters of Lord of the Flies arrive on the island as definite individuals, but as the story progresses they are reduced to cogs in a machine: titles of chief, hunter, thinker, savage. Each one becomes less an individual and more of an aspect of society; less themselves than what they are to others. This idea is also present in my piece. My narrator speaks of how when she was a child she was a little doll, being guided and led by omnipotent adults, but as she grows up she becomes less of a puppet and more of a piece of clay, being moulded by the primitive society of adolescence. Her personality is not her own to distinguish, it is made for her by what she is to those who surround her. Although I write with less poetry then Golding, I hoped to design this story as a tribute to his works.