Gosa mun vuolggan?

My dad used to accuse me of living the life of someone much older than myself.

He'd rage on and on whenever I came home from school and settled down for the day, getting into a comfortable chair and hacking away at my homework until it was all done, moving to face the nearest screen (whether it was the computer or the TV) as soon as that mindless exercise was over, never bothering with the things that should have been the center of my universe at the time: the endless walks through the mall, the long conversations about nothing, and all the sunlight that threatened to dye my skin a gloriously hideous shade of orange only found on the workforce of chocolate factories, instead saving all my energy for the next endurance round at the old "palace of knowledge and despair". My lack of youthful exuberance drove him nuts, and he wasn't shy about it.

But because I was the wildest of birds (which is just a fancy way of saying that I was a rebellious, POS teenager and thought had all the answers at the extremely tender age of fourteen), I doubled, tripled and quadrupled down on it. I even started rejecting invitations just to spite him, not realizing that every moment I spent in isolation only strengthened the cycle by making the invitations slow down until they stopped coming altogether.

By the time I was seventeen, I had no-one.

I had successfully driven everyone away with the icy dagger of rebellious indifference, something so cold as to burn.

When I finally realized what that little war of mine had caused, it was already too late.

But that's why I write, really: everything I publish is an act of repentance, a sort of message in a bottle addressed to the ghost of someone who was once there and who might never even get it, but that I deem deserving of an apology nonetheless. And the list is just barely starting to get thinner.

Just how long I will be at it --whether a month, a year, or a decade-- only time will tell, but what is clear is that I'm just getting started, and that I'm too deep to back down now. It is my hope that at least some of the people for whom these messages are meant learn to recognize the signals, to break the code, to match first names and screenames with the circumstances that surround them and realize that they are the ones being talked about in my endless rants about what was, what could have been and what should have been.