To Be Young

I want to get back to that feeling I had when I was younger. Freedom. We think there are all these barriers in front of the things we want when we are children; beauty, love, fame, fortune, knowledge, independence. But when we grow up, the barriers are still there, and we have grown, so we think that we can just leap over them, but what we don’t realise is that they have grown too, or they’ve transformed into something even harder to tackle. And we are so exhausted from being knocked back all the time because we were too young or too short or too weak or too stupid that we do not have the strength to climb over them or break them down. That is why I am lying here with my bare back against the threadbare floral carpet, listening to my father’s old Cat Stevens Records and trying to conjure up some feelings that were once sparked in my little body when his voice would float through our house like watery sunshine on a winter afternoon.
“If you want to sing out sing out./If you want to be free, be free./There’s a million things to be, you know that there are.”
I want to know when this ability he is singing of was taken from me and replaced with an entrapment by waves of guilt and sense of duty. There is no such thing as freedom in an urban life like mine, only it’s potential.