Chasing Sunsets

Hey all,

So, it's about that time again for me to post something on my blog, and here I've got something I'm really excited about. It's not poetry, but rather it's the first part of a non-fiction memoir type of thing I've been writing. It really centers around my struggles in high school and how I found hope, strength, and inner beauty from God to change my viewpoint on who I was as a person, and the difficult process that this was and still is from time to time.

I will post sections of the piece from time to time. Some of it will be cliche and some of it will be unedited, because mainly I have never written anything on this scale before, so it's bound to have mistakes. It's called "Chasing Sunsets" and the first part is the Introduction that I would like to call "Sixteen and Gray". Enjoy.

INTRODUCTION---"Sixteen and Gray"

I remember feeling gray. Not the old, crusty, turning-seventy-type of gray, rather, the gray that comes with a knowledge of guilt. I’m talking about the gray that is first felt by a teenager who realizes the safety net, pulled out in the middle of a three-ring circus that we call life, is gone. Gone are the parents who always held you after you fell and would give band-aids with the design of Spongebob Squarepants. Gone is the age where mistakes had no consequence, and the worst punishment would be a scolding and a spank. Gone are those times when you could spend the entire summer playing with toys alone or with a friend or two in a 10-minute attention span maximum or taking naps and coming up with new imaginary friends named George.



I remember being sixteen, gray and uncertain. There’s a turn when you hit high school, small and undetectable, a click in the brain that signals rebellion. The feelings tug at the heartstrings, hormonal impulses hit like bullets, and branching out on your own plays out in experimental ways like a guy’s decision to ramp the twenty foot stair railing that leads upward toward the school entrance or like a girl’s decision to wear black mascara and eyeliner with a new secretly bought spiked collar and black fish net stockings to finish the ensemble.

Sixteen is gray, not because you have lost all innocence, but because the world you thought you knew is now a much scarier, darker, more overwhelming world than you had ever imagined it, even at fifteen, when you are forced to immerse yourself inside the black of temptation. It is gray because you still have hope and you still see the beauty somewhere out there in the magazines, in the way the popular ones are worshipped, the way the toughest men are admired, but you forget to find it in the only place where it matters, the only place you overlooked. You are sixteen and gray because it has not yet dawned on you to think that the world is more than just being black or white, scathed or unscathed, a leper or a saint. We are sixteen and gray until we realize that the color we look so hard for in life is begging to be acknowledged and released from within.