I remember when I was a kid and it felt like I had the whole day ahead of me. You’d get home from elementary school after going through all the grueling subjects (learning to spell pumpkin, and memorizing your times tables, and what the primary colors are…it all felt so difficult at the time but now, wouldn’t it be nice to go back to that?), and you had all these huge plans—plans that were achievable. Getting off the bus, you knew you could fit a few episodes of "Danny Phantom" and "Zoey 101" in before dinnertime, that is if you didn’t spend your afternoon out jumping on your neighborhood friends’ trampoline. You’d beg for more time and your parents would force you to come inside, eat, then they’d tell you to go back out and play or watch more TV until a time appointed by them. It was the whole day you had—a huge day and everything felt so possible. Time felt infinite. Unending.
Looking back now, I’m at a loss. How in the world did the day feel so long? School ended at 3:30 p.m. and you were lucky if you got home at 4 p.m., then you had to fit in some time to do your homework if you had any (often writing the letter “z” or another one, twenty times for practice), you’d go have some fun, only to have to go to bed at your given bedtime. In elementary school I think my bedtime might’ve been eight. That’s four whole hours. Four!
Nowadays I might have from around noon and to midnight or nine in the morning to one in the afternoon of “free time” but it’s not really free time. Free time is just a lie we tell ourselves so that the work we have to stuff in there doesn’t seem so bad. So that we can tell ourselves that we’re watching that episode of "Grey’s Anatomy," when really it’s just background noise while we finish our essay. Or so we can tell ourselves we’re running a mile because we want to, when really it’s another form of work as we try to stay healthy and fit (it’s not a lot fun for me, at least, and I think I’d more enjoy that sort of “work” if ice-cream was involved).
I look back on the days when I spent an entire summer reading for fun (what a concept!) or spent my afternoons watching TV and I can’t believe they ever existed. They have to be a fake memory I’ve created so that I can benostalgic, right? It makes me jealous of that younger me—the lucky me. It also makes me resentful, too. Because why hadn’t I learned to work on my homework in the spare time that that half-hour bus ride gave me or why hadn’t I studied instead of not being able to say no to my friends (or just begged a little harder for my parents to buy me my own trampoline) because that could’ve been time for me to actually do something important. If I had, maybe now I wouldn’t feel stressed out and out of control, wishing I had that twenty-fifth hour in the day. Maybe I might not have to fight the inner slacker in me who wants to lounge around and do nothing, then feel like I’m on the edge of a breakdown a few hours later when I realize that doing nothing was a terrible, horrible waste of time.
Even more so, I wish that I had a chance to go back to that time of being a kid and really enjoy it—really live it—because the fact is, you have eighteen years of being a kid and then after that…well, if you live to be a hundred, you’ve got eighty-two of being an adult. That’s a heck of a chunk to deal with stress, adulting, and realizing that kids nowadays don’t even remember "Danny Phantom." That kids look at you and think that you were never young once and that you never had to go through the “hardships” they have and that you don’t know stress. But you do and what they don’t realize is that you’d switch places in a day.
Sometimes I wish I had "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button," and it wasn’t adulthood I could look forward to—but childhood. Then again, the grass is always greener, isn’t it?
