Day 2: Reality Checks

 

Reality checks. Growing up, there are those things we always wanted to do. We probably thought we would marry the first people we fell in love with. Imagine small Brian with the ashy legs and the rubber tie being your spouse. I know you looked him up on Facebook and time has not been kind, has it? Anywho, as time timed, you realized flying to space isn't going to work, so you double down. You decide maybe you should just go to uni and study business administration so that you can start as an intern and be a manager by the time you have your first child. You also want to be stable enough to build your parents a nice house. You owe them that much for sacrificing literal pieces of themselves to ensure that you had the best. 

But life isn't a dramatic afrosinema and by the time you are in campus, you realize diligence and hard work is not a light at the end of a tunnel, it was a train headed for you and your sanity. You take out student loans to help reduce the financial burden on your parents. You trudge and party through uni and graduate with a second class. This is bound to get you a job at least, right? Wrong!

Your enemies doing the most because aside from tarmacking from one end of the continent to the other, you are unknowingly attending the adult school of character development. You cant keep a partner, or rather they can't stay with you. 

You are now in your mid-twenties, surviving on either freelance jobs or a mind-numbing 9-5. Between alcohol-laced weekends and whatever happens during the weekday, it is easy to forget what you want to achieve with yourself. You have not made steps to elevate your life, let alone that of your parents. Time is flying insanely. Black tax and student loans have you on a hamster wheel. Jubilee is still in government...Heh! Shukisha. 

Reality checks remind you of where you want to be and just how far you are from there. They remind of what you are running away from and just how short a distance you have managed to create. You can see yourself tripping and falling back into the poverty, the smell so vivid it makes you sick. Maybe it's the abuse, the constant yelling, and fighting that sounds like sirens in a New York movie scene, ever-present. Or perhaps it's the absence of people, it's imminence so present it makes you feel alone in the most crowded of spaces.

You are no longer the 10-year-old dreamer and you are not yet the accomplished grown-up. You are somewhere in between, finding your way. Well, at least you have drug-induced flights to space no?

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