When the Clock Strikes Midnight

it's midnight.
your phone starts ringing and beeping.
look at that!
birthday wishes in bulk!
there's the long heartfelt text from your bestfriend,
and the template impersonal 'Happy Birthday' message from your friend from primary school whom you have not met in almost a decade.

you are finally 20.
a proper adult, you think to yourself.
while you browse through your Facebook wall, attempting to personally reply each and every one of the virtual wishes that you received, you stop for a while and wonder how much life will be different now that you are no longer a teenager.

from that point on, every word that comes out of your mouth sounds like a piece of wisdom (to yourself of course. others might beg to differ).

sometimes, when you sit by yourself and reflect on the past, you shudder at all the mistakes that you've made, and promise yourself that you'll never be as foolish again.

fast forward to three/four/five birthdays later.
your Facebook birthday wishes have exponentially replaced text messages and phone calls.
you would prefer nothing more than to enjoy a quiet evening with the people that you love rather than have a huge celebration filled with people you barely know.


once you get the opportunity to entertain your thoughts, you realize that the 20 year old you was just as dumb as the 15 year old you.

how could the 20 year old you not know how foolish and naive it was to think that the era of screwing up your own life is over the moment you become an adult? how could you miss the fact that it's only ever going to get worse?

Since your birthday three/four/five years ago,

you have fallen in love,
fallen out of it,
perhaps even do the whole thing a few times over.
at the end of the day, you'll question if you will ever settle down and find the real thing.
if you are lucky enough to have found the real thing, somewhere along the line you will be too comfortable and forget that sustaining anything good involves a lot of effort. and thus make a mess of everything.
repeat cycle as many times as necessary.

you have realized that the course you are taking in university/college is not really what you want to be stuck doing for the rest of your life.

you have also come across the revelation that you are NOT one-of-a-kind or unique in any sense at all. you are just another face in the crowd.

you have had dreams of changing the world.
and those dreams have been shattered in front of your own eyes.
because the world and everyone in it (including yourself) is so fucked up and there's too many wrongs around you and there's nothing you can do to challenge the government and the society.

It is as it is.