--The Encroaching Future-- [2007]

[Kevin J Bates Jr]

It’s one thing to know that you’re growing up, but it’s quite another to actually feel it.
Have you ever had that odd feeling of inevitability? That instinctive inkling that time is flowing toward you and that you are about to…. become. I can’t say why, with any form of certainty, but I have been feeling that a great deal as of late.
The areas of my life that were in the deep grips of a haze just a few years ago are not as nebulous as they once were. I’m beginning to see myself as I would like to see myself. The future for me seems so much more immediate now than it has in the past.
I don’t know if this is normal or strange, especially considering all that I’ve gone through over the past two years of my life. In 2005, Katrina hit and I was pressed through a bottleneck into St. Louis, in early 2006 my cousin Angie died after a years-long war against cervical cancer and on October 20, 2006 at roughly 8 in the morning, both my mother and step father were killed in a brutal car accident less than a mile away from our house.
I’m now roughly three months away from my twenty second birthday and I’m looking forward to it with curiosity of my future’s culmination. With so many system shocks taken and so many scars endured and opened and healed and opened again to be endured over again before they were completely healed, I’ve gotten a fair sense of the brevity of time. I no longer look to ten years from now as a distant thing but as something that I am only ten summers and falls away from.
I wonder how many young men know this feeling… and how many more should know it but deny their duty to grow up. The kinds of young men that have proven content to hang and bleed and die by the games of the world. Be it the weed game, the coke game, the broke game or the standard gaming of pretty women.
Looking back at it, in high school I never got with the trophy girls because I didn’t have ‘game’ but now looking back at it, I’m actually glad that I didn’t I don’t want it now. Like I said, I’m looking toward tomorrow’s tomorrow and far beyond it, so I don’t have the time, the energy or the stomach for those kinds of games. I wonder how many more people wouldn’t have been emotionally scarred if it weren’t for the games. But I guess you play games when you don’t have a sense of the encroaching future and in the end, I guess it’s one thing to know that you’re growing up, but it’s quite another to actually feel it.