26. People have families of their own to care for by that age. People have careers, and money, and success, and promising futures, and burgeoning social lives that work to integrate them fully as responsible adults in the larger fabric of society, by the time they are 26. There are even a few who have lived lives so fully that beyond 25 is past their prime for them.
And then, there are others, who are hiding from life, and more so with every passing year. People who don't have what it takes to look life in the eye, and to take from it all that ought to be taken as the rightful prerequisite to happiness and the maintenance of it; people for whom it is nothing but one painfully slow tick-tock to the final hour of emancipation. Among these sorts are the kind who turn off their cellphones on their birthdays just because people wishing them well embarasses them; the kind who are yelling 'leave me alone', but the sound never really makes it past their larynx in the form of anything but polite chuckles and exclamations. And yet, some of these misanthropes dream big dreams, and nurture warm fantasies of happily-ever-afters in some secluded corners of their hearts, without having the decency to admit to themselves that what they crave can never truly reach fulfilment in the suffocatingly narrow conditions of self-confinement that they have created around themselves. What it takes though is a rare courageous fool to be able to mock his own naiveté and capacity for self-delusion.
In any case, 26 down. How many more to go, only the Master Accountant upstairs can tell, or His celestial minion in-charge of The Slate.
No comments:
Post a Comment