Growing up can be wicked hard at times to say the least. Now that I’m actually an adult in the real world, I have no idea why I was in such a rush to grow up. It looked so glorious and seemed to be such a blast when I was a kid. Like being an adult was all I wanted, no rules, no one to answer to, it seemed like my own personal heaven. Shit was I wrong. Now that I’m an adult I realize how much of a fool I was. All I want to do is go back to being a kid again.

Take me back to those days when my mom would make the rounds to pick up all of my friends to go over to someone’s house. Those nights when we’d play manhunt, or ghost in the graveyard, or played Mario SuperStar baseball until someone’s parents finally made the rounds to pick us all up to take us all home. Those nights when the houses were filled with gatorades, party mix, and cheese balls as opposed to drugs, alcohol, and cocaine like it is nowadays.

I miss those days when I’d come home from football practice just in time for dinner. The table was set, the food was almost done, and I had enough time to shower before we all shared dinner at the table as a family. It was a time before any of us had cell phones, before people would eat in the living room in front of the tv, and before we all grew up and left the house we grew up in. Back when the world I knew was shrunken down to the size of my hometown.

Some of my favorite memories are from that summer when our whole friend group got new bikes for Christmas. We were old enough to be out on our own, we had our bikes and didn’t need anyone’s parents to drive us around, and spent our nights hanging out at the lake under the moonlit sky. Those nights when we could be out as long as we wanted and never had to worry about waking up for work the next day for work.

Ignorance is bliss. Isn’t that the damn truth. Take me back to the days before I had bills to pay. Take me back to before I had to make a decision on what I wanted to do with my life in high school. Take me back to the days when the hardest thing I ever had to do was to take the trash out from in the house when it was full. I had no idea how much I’d much rather be there than growing up so quickly being an adult and all.