Grown up

I stare at the screen and wait for the download to finish.

It is late. It is night. I had hoped that with the darkness also ease would come from the boiling heat. I was wrong.
I stare at the screen and think about what there is still left to do for this night. I did not allow myself a break and yet the breaks sneaked in from the backdoor and sabotaged my efforts for today. I live on my own, far away from home. I have a job and I’m even my own boss there. I’m independent.

I have grown up.

I am aware of how things get more serious. And with the seriousness come rules and structures, guidelines and processes, power and weakness, judgement and justice. My work has an impact. You could argue how big it is, but you cannot argue that it has some.

Sometimes cannot feel the seriousness.

Then I feel something between serenity and indifference, a state between feeling omniscient and lost.

I am independent. I am grown up. I am growing up. This seems to be a part of it. I am on my own. I am the one to contain my wandering spirit. To cast into the mere unbreakable armour and weapon of adulthood that have been promised to me by everybody and everything.

Yet – for the moment it is too hot to do it.

And I am stuck to the screen. Stuck to some deeper concept it represents. Something it seems to catalyze.

I silently count the seconds until the “Finished” sign pops up. Then I turn off the computer and open the window. I cannot feel the cold wind I expected. No ease for the sweating soul.

I take the money out of my pocket and put on my shoes. The light-switch is warm as everything else is. I open the door of my flat.

The sound of the closing door echoes through the darkness of the staircase. For a moment I feel all the fears of my childhood forming schemes in the blackness before me. I slowly go down the stairs, my hand at the stairrail. My steps echo in the ghostly blackness. I am alone. I am on my own. Nothing lights my way. It feels good.

As I leave the house, I can’t sense any difference in temperature.

Where should I go? The unknown ways as I always love to do? Or a quick walk around the block, where everything is secure?

I still have a lot of work to do. Just quickly clear my mind.

I take the known way to the left and listen to the sounds of the night. Everything is calm. I hear the sound of a cricket like the ones I heard in Italy and Greece. Everything is clear. What should be seen is enlightened, what should not be seen remains in darkness. This is the world of the grownups. I pass the supermarket and let its unusual peace sink in for a moment. The fastfood restaurant up the street is about to close and serving its last costumers – a group of Chinese girls. I try to find some trees to feel home, but at the one I find there is a group of shady looking guys waiting for something I don’t want to know.

Then I am home.

It was a quick round. Too quick, I decide and take the one street I haven’t explored yet. After 5 minutes I find a tiny playground that is hidden between the big houses. It lies in darkness. No place for grownups during day and no place to be at night.

I examine the playground in silent awe without knowing why.

As I enter it I can see the few toys it has. If this place inbetween urbanity really would make children happy?

I sit down on the swing. My shoulders are much too broad for it.

I loved it when I was a child. I could swing for hours, feeling the wind, feeling like a bird, dreaming away until my mother called me for dinner. My shoulders seem to have become to broad for flying – and they didn’t grow wings.

I start swinging a bit and remember how fascinated I was by the rapid change of perspective I could experience when I put all my strength into carrying me up into the air. Ground from above, heaven from below and inbetween a blast of impressions. I always jumped off from the highest point when I finished. I felt free.

I don’t jump off the swing. I simply get up and walk over to the little wooden castle in the middle of the playground. “My castle”, I think and grope up the little ladder to the platform on top of it. “I’m the king of the hill!” I soberly note without any irony. I don’t smile. I always took these kind of games deadly serious. Often even more serious then I took what other told me to take serious. In these games, I was always the leader of my team.

But they all grew up. They all started caring about more important things. Good grades. Good careers. Important organisations. Powerful companies. Serious things.

Sometimes I ask myself if they really left the little castle we used to play in.

But now I have grown up. I’m not anymore the boy with the tousled blond hair and the thousand unrealistic, visionary ideas. I’m not anymore the child living in wondrous worlds far away from reality. I worked hard to ground myself in reality. I shaped my behaviour so that I would not need to stay in hidden isolation any longer. I still wrestle with myself and my creativity to streamline it and channel it towards what I was expecting myself to work hard for. Every day is a struggle for integrating myself into this world.

I grew up.

Didn’t I?

I enjoy the darkness and silence of the playground. While I examine the sandbox from above, I remember the a question my former flatmate asked me once “How can you be so incredibly childish and mature at the same time?”. I don’t remember, what I answered to her. I only remember how I often started my epic projects in sandboxes, digging deeper and deeper, digging through the sandbox, through the normal ground below it until my little shovel was broken by the big stones in the soil.

I didn’t take a watch with me. But I know I wanted to get one step further towards being an strong and able adult today. There is around half an hour left. As always I will start the coming day with doing what is supposed to bring me nearer to it. I will grow up a little bit more. Like all the others did.

I ask myself if I’m on the right track, while I glide down the slide of the castle. The hair of my arms charges with electricity from rubbing against the plastic.

Maybe we understood wrongly, what growing up means.