Just because it made me cry.
"Oh, lord love you, Stephen. How I admire your arrogance and rage and misery. How pure and righteous they are and how passionately storm-drenched was your adolescence. How filled with true feeling, fury, despair, joy, anxiety, shame, pride and above all, supremely above all, how overpowered it was by love. My eyes fill with tears just to think of you. Of me. Tears splash on to my keyboard now. I am perhaps happier now than I have ever been and yet I cannot but recognise that I would trade all that I am to be you, the eternally unhappy, nervous, wild, wondering and despairing 16-year-old Stephen: angry, angst-ridden and awkward but alive. Because you know how to feel, and knowing how to feel is more important than how you feel. Deadness of soul is the only unpardonable crime, and if there is one thing happiness can do it is mask deadness of soul."
>>>>: lord love you to Stephen, lord love you too.
"You want to stay where you are, in the Republic of Pubescence, where feeling has primacy and pain is beautiful."
Gawd I agree with it. I am terrified of growing up, I'm terrified of not feeling, of forgetting how it is to be overrun with emotion. I know that every bit I rationalise, is saying good bye to whatever the hell this thing is that is me. Every change is a death, I read once, and dear lord I am not ready to die. I am not afraid of it, not death, not scared, or unsure, but I know in my deepest pits of my soul that I am not ready. I am just in my light, this thing that is me and I am not ready to lose it.
But I will, that is maturity, apparently, knowing that this too will pass.
I understand, Stephen, and I dont want to.