It's funny the things your brain does to you when it decides to take a trip down memory lane. I often find myself reflecting on times past, the fond memories as well as the painful. I don't know if it's because I have an insecurity about placing steps into my own future, or simply because the past is comfortable because I've already lived through it. Either way, I found myself wandering through the misty paths of times gone & vivid recollections of the things I have done thrust themselves in to the foreground of my mind, as if exploding from the fog they came, thick & fast. Why this time, this day I have no idea, but there they were bombardeing my senses like a riot stampeeding to the front of my brain. The days when being young seemed to be the worst injustice in the world, those days when all I wanted to be was an adult & I had no idea I was wasting my adolescence. Head strong, full of blind determination & sure, so sure of myself & what I wanted, that I never thought it possible I would tread another path to the one I had chosen for myself. Those days, so very far away now, of bike rides at weekends in the hight of summer, to the wet & windy walks through Ironbridge without a care for the rain or even in the world. Nothing phased me in those days. I had my friends, whom I thought I would never lose no matter what, I knew where I was going in my life & everything was going well. I had no cause to feel sad or depressed as I remember, but rose tinted lenses will always enhance the past out of what it truely was. The rain, that rain, I remeber that day as if it were yesterday. It is so clear when I think on it. Marching up & down the sodden streets, jumping in the puddles, all the puddles, the bigger the better. We were so wet anyway that we cared little for the flu like consequences of our actions. Singing at the tops of our voices. roud that we knew all the words & caring little for those who were as insane as us & walked the opposite path, staring at us from under thier brollies & hoods, the water dripping off every part of them, cold & heavy. They must have thought us quite uneven, but who were we to care! We did not need to read minds to understand what they thought of us, but we cared not. Passion of youth kept us warm & happy on that day. The rain beat down on us, heavier than I think we had seen it that year, but we spared no second thought for ourselves other than our enjoyment of that moment. An intimate flicker of innoscense that we would soon lose through the process of time. How I miss that day. How I long to go back there & re-live that one moment, just for a second, just to remember how it felt to be able to take life for granted & care little for the results. Youth, that most fragile of times lasts longer than we want it to when we are living through it, but once it's passed it seems to have abandonned us far to quickly. Flying away from us, desperate to leave our sides, draggin itself away from our clawing fingers as we fruitlessly try to keep a grip on it, denying ourselves our maturity for as long as possible. Change happens to us all in the end, there is no way to avoid it. Innoscense stripped from its owner, never to return & given to another who has entered this world after us. A never ending cicle, pattern of events. But oh the memories.....they are worth a life time of youth.