how i expected it (the book) to fuck me up: clown scary, reddie sad :(
how it actually fucked me up: aging is a one-way road. you can go back to revisit a place, but never a time. you can never go back to who you were as a child, not for long, not really. your infinite potential got locked down and chipped away with age, and you will inevitably lose an entire world as time changes you. the love for others that you felt as a child was so vivid, and yet the memory of all those people can still vanish without much lingering trace in your adult mind, fading by degrees, until you might feel an ache, but you won't even know who you miss or why. eddie was so brave, he died for the people he loved, but his corpse is going to rot in the dark unmourned by everyone he died for, everyone who knew and loved him best in return. they lost him and they don't even know, and so too you'll lose precious things and people over and over and not realize their loss but became lesser and smaller for it all the same. you will have new bonds with new people, and they will make life worth living, but they will be an unconscious echo of buried formative experiences, in cycles you can't escape or understand, but they are all you have. your imagination will inevitably narrow and shrink and grow brittle with time and routine, you'll lose the ability to play without self-consciousness, and you'll stop noticing so much of the world, stop caring, and keep losing bits of yourself, and endlessly be forced to move on. there's such endless grief in growing up, but of course innocence was full of pain and fear too, without the perspective of experience to soften it. you wouldn't want to go back if you understood what that meant. it can be a kindness to forget the past, but there is always a cost of who you were and could've been. you can't prevent any of this or undo it once it's done. the turtle can't help us, man. the turtle's fucking dead.
2087
blakekathryn
jacobvanloon
jbbartram-illu
germansingergirl
stormborns
kaledo-art
