To Be Carefree

I'm trying to remember what it meant to be carefree. It seems like an act of pure will now to exist in this world and just let things be. I just can't seem to manage it. It's like something that only children can master, the art of enjoying everything in the moment as it is without fear or worry or the burden of what the next day brings. I envy those little beings. They are able to laugh and cry without any shame. They don't care if you're staring at them or judging them. They live. And in that living there is something freeing, because they don't let the things of this world worry them. They are in the moment. This moment. Right now.

My moments consist of memories. Every single act I make reminds me of another time. It's like constant deja vu. For example, reading in the sunshine always transports me back to my childhood where nothing existed except for me and my books. I could remember the smell of them clearly, earthy and deep. The feeling of anticipation as I turned the page back then felt almost haunting as I'd turn the page of my current book in the present. It was as if I've been transported back in time and I was 12 years old again, with nothing but the end of the story stretching along those hot summer days.

Or I'd walk through a neighborhood in Brooklyn where private houses stood on either side of the street like quiet soldiers and I'd remember the many walks home from school. I'd find myself staring at the shadows of the trees on the sidewalk, jumping on the patches of sunlight that the leaves permitted to shine down. For a moment, I was weightless. My life is constant nostalgia, constant parallels. I live in this world and the next, the next being a world of events already gone by, already lived. They appear like mirages in my vision and I succumb to them, aware of how this life mimics the one of long ago. Except for one main thing. I've forgotten what it means to be carefree, to skip in the patches of sunlight that the trees provide or to laugh and be silly without the self consciousness that comes from caring what others think. Always, always I would turn and look around, worried that someone had caught me in a moment of reverie. I've forgotten how to let things be. Even though the memory sits upon my heart pulsing with each action I take, a mirror of a childhood that follows me wherever I go.