Growing up.

It's such a scary thing, isn’t it?

When the world starts to expand past our small towns and cities; pass our own perpetual vision that we can no longer see where the world ends, or where we begin. You start to see that the reality around you is made up of so muchmore than just what you see, but is also what you don’t. It’s in the moments when you start packing up for college, when you get your first job, or when you finally move out to your first apartment, that you start to realize that the world is bigger than the friends and family you have been surrounded with your entire life; that it’s bigger than you. It can seem like the world has tilted off its axis because you are going through all your firsts, and there is no manual or set of instructions for how to stand or how to fall; there is no guide to tell you what to do when your childhood friends become ghosts, or what to do when the world becomes too much.

School doesn’t prepare you for the pains of growing up. Teachers will prepare you for what will be on the next test, teach you how to find x and y, and how to answer an open-ended question.

But they never prepared me for my first kiss.

They never prepared me for my first break up.

They never prepared me for the late night talks with my best friend.

And they never prepared for the day I realized she wasn’t a true friend.

They never prepared me for the things I really wanted teaching in.

It would have been nice to have a class on my high school schedule called, Heart break 101 or The Art Of Letting Go II: The Fake Friends Seminar. They don’t tell you what to do when the game goes south, or how to catch yourself at the fall or stop yourself from falling in the first place.

Or maybe that was all part of a different classroom I couldn’t see, maybe life was the classroom and the teacher was God, who thought attendance or grades weren’t necessary because we faced the biggest test day of all every week: tomorrow.

And he leaves us to decide if we fail or pass on our own.

I don’t know what it is about life that makes it such a little bastard, who finds pleasure in coming up with the means to complicate our tangled stories with more drama than necessary.

For instance, Love was one of them. Whether it took place in the middle of our high school or college chapters, love was a constant fickle ocean whose waves tickled the shores of our young unused hearts. We find ourselves in the chaos of someone else, and there is beauty in such a connection, but there is also pain, because it is a dangerous thing when you let someone else complete who you are before the foundation of the person you're meant to be is still in it’s beginning stages, and not even close to finished. It’s not an easy thing to let someone see who you really are, from my perspective; from what I’ve learned so far, it’s a game of masks. We play like to play the role of a prince or a queen that is beyond the others standards, we love to put on a show; show the best masks of who we are, rather than our worst. We wear masks full of smiles, of promises, of funny stories, and of laughs that never knew sadness. However, the pretend game is just another part of growing up, but there is also a serendipity to it all when the masks finally come off, and it has become more than just a game; more than just an act. It is a wonderful thing when the darkness of who you are is lit by the spark of the light they burned in you. The day their smiles start inspiring poems; start igniting sunsets in your twilight skies, is the day you know you found not the person that completes you, but the person that, in the words of Elena Gilbert,”makes you glad that you are alive”. Through the role playing and pretending; through the firsts and the lasts, there is a happy ending to your love stories, even if you can’t see them now, don’t worry about it. Fate just hasn’t finished writing you the ending you don’t have to settle for, but the one you deserve.

Now, love stories and romantic cliche’s isn’t the only thing fate has control of, but of the friends we meet along the way. Sometimes we have that one friend; that one person we consider as good as a sister or brother and then becomes a ghost between the gaps of time and change. However, that is how you know in the long run, who will stay at the end of the day, and who will leave before the sun even sets. It’s hard to let go of the friends you’ve known from the playground days when Pokemon games were still just playing cards and Game Boy chips and not apps that have practically taken over the world. That’s when you realize growing up means growing apart, and it’s a hard pill to swallow, I know. But believe me,facing the unknown of the scary adult world with a loyal pack of three, is still better than a pack of twelve who wear two masks when you’re around. You want to face the unknown of life with the ones you trust; with the guys and girls who have had your back since day one, and have never made you feel like you were fighting any battle, no matter how small, alone.

It’s okay to be a little scared of the unknown, but it is never okay to walk away from it because you don’t know what’s out there, beyond the misty fog. It’s a venture; a voyage everyone must sail on, in order to find a treasure more valuable than gold, and that treasure, whether you believe it or not, is yourself. Even if the seas seem treacherous and vast, you must sail through them. Life isn’t supposed to be easy, we aren’t supposed to have everything figured out, it’s okay to be a little lost because the truth is, most of us really are, we are all just wanderers, too afraid or stubborn to ask for directions. We don’t always know where we’re going, but what matters most, is where we end up. Through the hardships of growing up, sometimes the places we find ourselves in, are in the people or places we always least expect, and that is beauty in it’s rawest form.