‘Catch 22’ in the fine print.

Personal Essay by Eli Howard.

I was raised In Centreville Virginia. I had lived there for 8 years, and then I moved. I was a very lucky child to live there; tightly knit community, plenty of kids to hang out with, and a best friend. What more could I have had to live or long for? Other than the occasional superficial ‘I want this, this, and that’, I still don’t know. Then I moved. I moved to Vienna Virginia; approximately 10 miles away from Centreville.  

I lost most of what I took for granted. Most people would look at ten miles and say that it was nothing; that they could get there and back within 30 minutes. I was too young to understand the initiative it would take to continue to live with what I had in a completely different and spaced out neighborhood without many kids. I’m stuck in that 8 year old stage because I was taken away from the place I was growing up in. I never finished growing up because of it. Half of me is still 8 years old, while the other half is wise beyond my years. I now understand the importance of good friends and close neighbors. I cherish that which I have learned, and live a fuller life because of it. I still wish I hadn’t moved, but only for one measly reason of leaving my best friend away and behind. Other than that, I’m glad. Glad that I can now realize things that most adults don’t until it’s too late. I can realize the importance of friendship. Without it, you can never grow up. You can grow older and older without realizing what you’re missing by simply just hanging out every so often with a couple of pals for some board games. Without friends you can’t mature, and with them, you don’t realize you’re maturing. A classic catch in the fine print; if you have something, you don’t realize its importance until it’s lost. That’s not to say you should purposely go out in search of a new home to take your child away from his friends. Oh no, that’s the epitome of all things bad for ones parental reputation among ones kids.

If you move away into the distance, for no apparent reason other than the hopes of quickly maturing your kid then you deserve nothing more than his/her misunderstanding, confusion, distress, and loneliness. For that is what will befall him or her. To take away childhood for maturity to set in will permanently bond innocence on the kid until he becomes a laughingstock of the town. At least, that’s what will be perceived; as the child will not be able to take the blunt edge of such childish play because of the confusion and misunderstanding surrounding such topics. It’s what happened with me.

Looking back now, I can see what I missed, and it wasn’t because of the fact that I was deprived of childhood by my parents, but of the sad fact that I did it to myself. This is not to say that I was aware of what I was doing, because I; honestly, wouldn’t let go. Those 8 years of living in Centreville with my best friend formed a bond of dependency from me to him, and not in reverse. Though I was so distraught because of such a great thing breaking like a twig in front of my eyes, Jack was ok with it. He was able to move on because he didn’t have to deal with moving. Everything he had ever known was right there in front of him, and he never needed to do too much to get what he needed. Eventually, he drifted away from me. To make an example of it, say we were climbing a rope, and he was in front of me. The rope gets cut in between me and him, I try and scramble to grab hold of his end and miss while he continues to climb unaware of what wrong has happened. I’ve been falling ever since. That is, until a short while ago, when I caught hold of another rope. To this day I climb that rope, to see all the other people climbing it. Life is a rope that you climb. Everyone has their own rope. If you read the fine print and read the rules, what you do when you climb the rope is up to you. I forgot to read it, and because of not reading it, I hit a ‘Catch 22’ and got cut from the rope I was on. I now read the rules, and avoid the catches.