Adolescence faded before I realized it. My voice deepened, my back straightened, my childish runs across summer fields became steady marches toward something else, though I wasn't sure what.
When you're young, the world feels endless. But the older I grew, the more I saw its borders. Bills. Work. Family burdens. Whispers of "responsibility."
And yet, at that age, I still dreamed.
I thought often of leaving the small hill. Of carrying myself to the city, where the streets glittered with promise. I'd heard rumors from boys whose cousins had gone there, that jobs were plenty, that lights never dimmed, that dreams weren't so easily crushed under silence.
At night, when the house had settled into gloom, I'd slip outside and sit on the slope, looking at the distant specks of lamps from neighboring towns. To me, they were stars fallen to earth, waiting to be grasped.
I whispered promises to myself.
"I'll go there. I'll change everything."
But dreams have rivals. My parents, rigid as mountains, tied me down.
"Work here," my mother said. "Help your father."
My father, though gentler in word, only added to the weight: "The world is crueler than you think. Better to endure what you already know than be swallowed by what you don't."
I nodded. Always nodded. But inside, I was restless.
It wasn't rebellion, not in the sense of storming off. It was a quiet rebellion. Those secret moments where I drew maps in my head, scribbled letters I never meant to send, and imagined myself walking streets I'd never seen.
Around that time, I picked up small jobs, hauling, fixing, tending fields. My body grew harder; the boy softened by summer laughter was beginning to change. The money I earned was barely my own, but the sense of control, however fragile, was intoxicating.
And hobbies too, tiny fragments of identity.
I loved carving things from wood. Perhaps I inherited that from my father. But unlike him, I carved not silence, but escape. Little wooden birds, fish, shapes of houses I'd never lived in. Some I gave to children. Some I kept in a box beneath my bed. They were… perhaps the first things in my life that truly felt mine.
Of course, love reentered my thoughts too. Even if she, the girl by the river, was gone, her absence left an ache that demanded filling. There were other faces now. Smiles across the market. Brief conversations during chores. Fleeting blushes under lanterns at festivals.
But none lingered. None struck me with the same permanence.
I began to wonder if perhaps what I sought wasn't love, but an escape, a companion who might lead me away from the small hill shackled around my ankles.
A selfish thought, perhaps. But many dreams begin selfishly.
Looking back now, lying on this bed all these decades later, I realize how naïve I was.
I believed wholeheartedly that tomorrow would always come. That it would always be brighter than today. That the world was simply waiting for me, patient, forgiving.
I thought the future was a place of reward… not the battleground it truly is.
Still… that youth, that hunger, was real. For all the regrets that followed, I can't despise the boy I was then. He had hope. He had something I lost too quickly in adulthood.
And hope, even if fragile, is never truly wasted.