The Best Years
We spent the best years of our lives sitting in empty rooms, waiting for brilliance to strike us. Waiting for a call to action too strong, too loud to ignore. Staring at our own feet, waiting to be swept up in a crowd, joyous with the cry that something must change. We waited for that leader to finally speak all the words we needed to hear before we would shake ourselves awake at long last. Before we would walk outside and look each other in the eyes as the sun shone down on our beautiful bodies and the wind played with our hair.
But instead we sat in empty rooms, staring at our own feet. And if somebody said those words - well, we weren't really listening in the first place.
We were too busy pulling out our hair over our own loneliness, asking the dead, stale air how we let things get so bad. But there was no one to hear or answer our sad, stifled plea.
And when we did venture out, we did not look each other in the eyes. When we made love it was shallow and desperate, never sinking past the skin between us. We did not clasp hands nor recognize nor rejoice in the reflective beauty of our souls - like pieces of a shattered mirror, waiting to be united as part of a great and wonderful mosaic.
Because we spent the best years of our lives sitting in empty rooms, waiting.
We are waiting still.
And we will be waiting for a long time to come. There is no call to action stronger than which sings in our own hearts. But we do not recognize that song as a call to freedom. We have become as stagnant as the air in desolate rooms of houses long abandoned. For all these youthful years we have not flourished - for no living creature can thrive in a vacuum.
Instead we languished. And we languish still.
But instead we sat in empty rooms, staring at our own feet. And if somebody said those words - well, we weren't really listening in the first place.
We were too busy pulling out our hair over our own loneliness, asking the dead, stale air how we let things get so bad. But there was no one to hear or answer our sad, stifled plea.
And when we did venture out, we did not look each other in the eyes. When we made love it was shallow and desperate, never sinking past the skin between us. We did not clasp hands nor recognize nor rejoice in the reflective beauty of our souls - like pieces of a shattered mirror, waiting to be united as part of a great and wonderful mosaic.
Because we spent the best years of our lives sitting in empty rooms, waiting.
We are waiting still.
And we will be waiting for a long time to come. There is no call to action stronger than which sings in our own hearts. But we do not recognize that song as a call to freedom. We have become as stagnant as the air in desolate rooms of houses long abandoned. For all these youthful years we have not flourished - for no living creature can thrive in a vacuum.
Instead we languished. And we languish still.