Innocence and Experience.

I grew up in a society where kids in my generation had started the dating game when most of us were less than thirteen years old. In Form 1, girls and guys from the same cliques were already interchanging partners on a monthly basis. I personally, had found it disgusting. Dating your friend's boyfriend when she's done with him or vice versa? The population of this country is not that dire. I couldn't help feeling like it's some Neo Nazi experiment where one should only date within their "cool circle" to not contaminate their "coolness" in the society. To only be able to read "social" labels, like Hitler and his Supreme Race. It sickens me.

You travel in a group, you talk the same, you dress the same, you have the same interests and hey! whad do ya know, identical boyfriends! O wait, he was just yours last month. What kind of inferiority complex were they suffering from? Why the insecurity? Peer pressure? Ugh what a dirty ph(r)ase. Can they not function without the other half? What other half? You haven't even got your braces off and yet you want to moan and groan about the ramification(s) of true love? I say you were asking for it. Then again, in Form 1, I was busy getting 9 holes pierced in my left ear and jacking CDS from music stores so I'm nowhere better.

Hence the above statement can be a little unfair. After all, one can only live their own experience. I could have my sympathy for a friend who'd lost a parent but could never feel the full blow of it without being under carbon copied circumstances.

So even though my teenage years were profuse in power chords and carpet-burnt knees, decks and dodos, DIY clothes (markering, painting, liquid papering, cutting, tearing and taping jeans & shirts) and failed attempts at veganism, I was not spared from witnessing the "puppy love" doctrine, passing me by like the Titanic in all its ignorant glory. There was another phrase, brazenly used as if it was Darwin's own: "Love is blind."

And sadly, once upon a time, I believed it true. I thought, "Hey thats right, when you love, you are blind to the faults of the other and their qualities shine like the Pearly Gates." Wrong.

But now, a little older, a little bruised and battered, a little wiser (I'd like to think), I honestly think that love cannot be blind. Love opens up your inner eye and you see everything lucidly. The world has more colors than you knew existed. Love the good, embrace the flaws. How else can beauty surface if everything was black or white (or if everyone keeps dating within their social circle, ha.)

But as I venture from William Blake's world of innocence into the world of experience, I am petrified to find that its irreversible. I can't go back to not knowing how pain can cut through your soul. Each time my heart constricts I hear this drumming into my head.