What We Thought We Already Knew

It was because we were allowed to convert religions and dye our own hair that we felt old

old in the sense that we were free, independent, and rightfully so we could become someone so different from who we had been the day before

the sequence of events that created an angsty period of our short lives called high school became nights spent watching lolita

or cursing loudly with passion in our eyes regarding a book about teenage suicide and the virgins who fled their Catholic parents before they tasted alcohol

We felt a temporary fix of adulthood, idolizing dead men whose synth was the soundtrack to our adolescence 

we thought we knew things about people and what it meant to love

a romantic hormonal pessimist will never understand the deepest definition of love until she is there, in that moment of final admiration

otherwise said hormonal optimist teen will fall in love everyday on public transport or in the safety of her bedroom, watching strangers walk on the sidewalk, each of those people leaving her with a glimpse of a life on some faraway planet, exsisting only in the crevaces of her mind, she wrote their stories threaded together by lies

we were old because we knew that people could feel shitty and darkness comes quickly sometimes leaving you breathless or making you want to vomit or sing or preach or cry or dance or laugh half heartedly at misfortune

and when we watch men of great stature falling from great heights because of some kind of addiction

we recognize the face of repression

and the paradox of humanity

we read to escape suburbia and to find solace

we are nocturnals, insomniacs without a reason to dream because we thought we knew reality

just because you wear black doesn't mean you know life has given you the worst its got

just because you say something you heard on the news doesn't mean you know more than the common man

just because you can carve your name into a tree that will grow to be a 100 doesn't mean you will leave legends

and just because you declare yourself an original doesn't mean you have had a thought of your own

little girl, this is a cruel world and your tongue hasn't tasted ignorance 

little girl you know but one thing, humans are complex creatures and those who claim to know Gods secrets

are lying, convinced themselves blind and power hungry leaches

there is no hell, little girl, I am a walking paradox

but if we learn to forgive

he who is almighty must forgive

otherwise he shall be a hypocrite like me

otherwise he would be a human

we thought we were old because we were simply alive and doing things on impulse and doing things with a few more years in our back pockets

nobody knows what we had thought we knew

-Ember Nocturne