disclaimer Not mine, won't ever be. And I most sincerely apologize to James M. Barrie and Baz Luhrmann. I didn't mean to mangle your creations, but it was the middle of the night and one thing just led to another. /disclaimer
I sit here, one wrinkled hand tremulously handling a goblet, long gray beard doing nothing to obscure the lines on my face, dim eyes squinting behind their spectacles.
And to think, I never wanted to grow old.
So pitiful the way grown men try to turn themselves into children. Wandering around in furs and kimonos, growing their hair long, partaking of any substance that numbs the mind, trying to drown all the world's troubles in wine, trying so hard to be young again. And sadly, it's all that can be done.
This is nothing at all like the simple, wonderful euphoria of spending countless days in strings of scrapes and scuffles and laughter. No. Here, all is artificial, locked away in this big bright world where the closest I can ever come to reaching those days once more is through the bottom of a glass. The fairy will come for me again, dancing just out of reach, laughing and teasing in her nimbus of emerald and jade, and I will plead.
Please, Tinker Bell, you know me; I was with you and Peter when we rescued Slightly from the Indians, remember? And you remember when the twins were lost in the wood, how I was the one who found them, don't you?
But she'll smile and sparkle and shake her head and dance away, leaving nothing but the words no, you're too grown up shimmering forever inside my head. And I'm left to do what I can, creating powdery explosions to brighten and excite the dullness I spent such a long time fleeing, yet eventually inherited nonetheless. Nothing more than tawdry imitations, my effects can never compare to the cannon fire and bursting exhilaration of the adventures no one but children can have. The hills, I know, are alive with the sound of music; it rings out forever in my mind, but I can never go back to those hills, nor can I ever be as alive as the music. Never again.
So I smother it in my eruptions as best I can, striving to make myself believe this world is enjoyable in its own way. The lie grows bitter in my brain, more bitter than the quelling liquids I swallow. There never is any escape—she comes then, dancing mockingly in my mind's eye, leaving me to awake disillusioned once again. Starting over then, back to the explosions, for theatres, for gasping women, astonished men, the everlasting laughter of their offspring. And, from pampered brats to scabby-kneed guttersnipes, that laughter is always the same.
They are everywhere. The next generation, born to carry on the dreams of their predecessors. It gives me hope to know this, and I smile at them sometimes, those wide-eyed infants whose mothers warn them to stay away from debauched old men such as myself. My smile always fades, then; I know, in truth, that they too will grow old and defeated.
If I were to leave a legacy behind, it would be no utopian dream, no all-encompassing epic of a wish. Only a breath, a simple whispering of words, but poignant enough to brand itself into minds everywhere.
Stay young while you can. Stay young forever.