ECSTASY

141

I'm in the midst of a generational love affair, a tragic family, only tragic because every year moves on and children grow up and move out and find love and their parents who used to be the stars of the show get edged out of the picture, they become the elderly generation, with silver hair and laid back smiles. 

They give the little kids sweets and tease the parents. They think briefly of their own grandparents, when they were the little ones. It's all in their heads now. It's all in the past and it's all gone. It's all memory washed blue with time. Those vibrant people are no longer the story. They are the invisible pages that exist before every book but are never written, do not need to be written.

Now the kids are the oldest in the room and their kids are older and their kids are young and fresh and wild. So wild and full of time. So much time it makes their cheeks flushed like they are drunk on minutes, each second a straight shot of something strong. The kids run around the house screaming. I found something! I found—mama! Look! And the parents amuse the children, looking and pointing and gasping appropriately. 

They were kids once, though they hardly remember. They don't quite want to remember. No one likes to give up that innocence; rather, they don't want to admit they have already given it up. They have thrown it all out the window—their lives that is, their freedom—when they had kids of their own. 

Now the older parents smile and nod and sip their coffee and pat the children's heads as they sprint past. They remember holding their own kids, worrying and loving all the time, wonderstruck with it all, but also exhausted, and exhilarated. Tiny heads, tiny hands, the cutest smiles. That's all gone away now. Locked in the past, accessible only by dreams. People get old and die and those dreams are lost forever, lost with the mind who kept them safe, kept them alive. 

And now these young ones will grow up and one day be the old ones in the room, and they will briefly remember from time to time when they were kids, when they were the young ones with all of the attention shined right on them, and how their parents hovered and how the old ones snuck them candy when the parents weren't looking. 

And these kids that are now old will think back and understand how it all fits like a really large puzzle that never ends and look on the new kids with some nostalgia for a time you can never get back, a snapshot of a moment you would relive forever, and they see now how they are the last gatekeepers of those memories, of their parents when they were still young and taking on the world and starting families, of the old ones now long gone but still a backbone in their memories, a light in the ever descending darkness that looms when they look over their shoulders and the time that has passed stretches in a dark abyss behind them.