Infatuated with Adolescence

The teenage years are such a beautiful phrase. Caught between the world of adults and children, we could be willful, fling ourselves about without restraint, eat ice cream until it was still smeared around our mouths, and find a warm hug or an affectionate hand close at hand whenever we wanted one.

I was just remembering, back when I’d just started high school, sitting in the neighborhood chatting over yogurt with a girl who loved TVB dramas (I suppose I still counted as a kid back then too) — talking about which series was good, which actor was good-looking… laughing together, snorting milk out of our noses together, that white sticky liquid spraying all over the two of us.

Maybe this counts as a kind of 'childhood sex play' — though it's nothing at all like what boys do! — Maybe this counts as a kind of ‘childhood sex play’ — though it’s nothing at all like what boys do!

In the blink of an eye, I’m nearly twenty now, and she no longer appears anywhere within easy reach of my world. After I changed my QQ number, I never bothered to look up hers again. If she ever thinks back on those scenes too, I’m stubbornly convinced she’d feel it more bitterly than I do — because she’s probably still living in that same neighborhood where we used to play for so long, that familiar yet faintly aching playground.

Is this flowing water, or is it time slipping away?

Where is she now? To me, that blurred space is exactly my own fading teenage years.

Just like those two sisters in the photographs, adolescence is one unfinished story after another, one rambling tale after another without an ending. Perhaps only when our youth is gone, when we touch the deep lines on our foreheads and pick up photographs already yellowed and faded, will we remember those distant spring dreams — like smoke, like mist, like rain; and yet not smoke, not mist, not rain at all.

The photographs above are taken from The Adventures of Guille and Belinda and the Enigmatic Meaning of Their Dreams