Halfway

Yes. We hung out in coffee houses, which at the time meant shelves of donated books and  ratty old furniture and bent cards and old board games and a live mic, and it meant someone from our generation might be profiting from our presence, and

Yes. We loved our friends more than we loved our families, knowing that in a pinch we could count on these chosen few to show up and lay down beside us and listen and cry, and

Yes. We married them, and

Yes. We had aspirations, many of them infinitesimally small because we were jaded and bitten over the grandiose failures of our parents’ promise, and

Yes. Some of us moved towards those frail dreams and some of us fell flat or fell into careers or fell into families, and

Yes. We failed to follow through on the neat idea of the great lot of us choosing a small city and living together, and

Yes. Some of us got divorced and some remarried, some even twice, because in your twenties all you can imagine is loving your friends, rather than finding someone who will make you better, and

Yes. We are only halfway towards forever and already feeling the squeeze of a world being held onto tightly by our parents and inherited  quickly by our children, and

Yes. You can blame us for the far right-wing and for government shutdowns and for legal pot and for the death of print and for all the new technologies, but

not for this music, nor this mindless sharing, nor the apocalypse.

‘Cause, see. We never sought to save the world, nor to destroy it. We just thought we would sit face to face and know our neighbors, and taste the air around us, and taste the beats and leave the best examples of ourselves mired in drug-induced rhythms and exiting early. And,

Yes. We thought we’d leave a live mic open in the center of it, so someone could sing, or slam, or scream.