Naughty nineteen! ;)

(Here is a dedication to the nineteen amazing years I’ve lived, loved and cherished every moment of with all my heart.)

It seemed like only yesterday that I was celebrating my fifth birthday within the dingy and somber surrounds of my boarding school. Years have since flown past and I’ve moved much far from that immune and sheltered confine.

There have been experiences, that unless afflicted with Alzheimer’s, I could never forget. I’ve been to places, though not very far from the other, that have had a world of difference in appeal, been educated in schools that have followed starkly contrasting principles of learning, met people – many who still remain friends, some as acquaintances, and others as passing clouds, who in their passing have still played a pivotal role in understanding and absorbing life’s lessons.

There have been those many moments of investigative curiosity to gain access to the restricted bounds of the nonpareil adult world - those several games we played when dressed up as mom and dad, in their over-sized clothes and shoes that would house both our little feet, characterizing ourselves to do those things they did – smoking sweet cigarettes, sipping coke coquettishly out of quaint paper cups, applicating lipstick lollies all over our faces in the pretence of being made up, the thrill of stealing the ‘un-allowed’ food from the refrigerator and slyly carrying it out into the yard, climbing trees, sitting under tea bushes – Oh!..I could go on!

And all of a sudden, here we are, out in the ‘big bad world’, still finding our feet and hoping, as each day passes, to get, the proverbial, ‘wiser’. Every moment holds in it some essence that will leave pleasant flavours lingering and an occasional bitterness, that though unpalatable, is, but as always, only for the good. Slowly are we being inducted into the adult world – the one we ever so eagerly wanted to gain access to and yet, now we stand hesitantly as we are on the threshold.

Hoping to take the right leap forward and for many more brilliant years that would make every infinitesimally little moment of life ever special. Cheers to life!