Is it the youth that's running through my veins that's fuelling this feeling, or the realisation that it is running out and I have yet to live as a youth should?

But I play with the word as if I have known it all my life; as if it were a bar and I was ordering my favourite drink. Yet I find myself pondering what is this drink, and what does it taste like?

What is youth, truly?

Is it numb hands and scribbled words, late nights and silvers of sleep, droning voices and endless books? Is it the highest of expectations and weights of responsibility, quiet sobbing in bathrooms and blank stares, artificial smiles and gritted teeth? 

Because that is all I've known. That is my youth.  

Yet I find myself in a place of darkness, hopelessly lost. I recognise this bile rising up my throat as if it were an old friend — regret. 

I realise that I had been treading the edge, clinically cautious and painfully safe. I executed a dance that I knew would keep me on the ledge, far far away from the noisy street and the shiny black car that looked fast enough to steal my breath away before I could feel the pain. 

I do not want safety. I want contentment. 

I point a toe in the air just inches off the ledge, above heads of passers by, steadying myself to jump. 

If I fell through the night, with the air embracing me like a lover and the moonlight clothing me with its pale glow, would I finally be able to feel what youth is, truly?

Reckless enough to latch onto a chance at happiness, that is how I want to be.

The sound of hurried sirens blare down the streets, but it is muffled through the glass windows that allow me the view of the city cloaked in dusk. Maybe that someone, laying on the stretcher with hands running all over him desperate to keep him alive, decided to be a little reckless too. 

At least he could close his eyes in perfect knowledge that he had achieved what I never could in his youth; peace with oneself.

— n. u.