It hit me last Tuesday.

And it hurt. A lot.

So much that I cried, actually, even though that made me look like an idiot. What's more, I'm going to look even more like an idiot when I tell you what it was that hit me. It wasn't the whole breaking up with a boyfriend routine. I've never even had a boyfriend, let alone one to break up with. It wasn't the sudden jolt one gets when their conscious mind finally decides to realize that a loved one is gone forever. No, with me, it was the realization that I'm not going to be able to play in any more BCI concerts.

I never realized that music meant so much to me. Or my flute, the precious number Twenty Four, who I guarded from certain members of the band for weeks up until the concert, making sure that I'd get to play her in my last time up on the stage. She has a personality all her own, that flute. She didn't even mind when I put that dent in her head piece.

But this member of the BCI Music Office Posse had to put her wonderful flute away for the last time and accept the fact that she's going to live in residence at the University of Toronto at Mississauga, where she will take Anthropology and Archaeology, and later dig up (or dredge up) Atlantis.

Okay. So I'm a lame ass. So behind my rather bitter exterior there lies a sap. Sue me. I cried because I realized that a specific chapter in my somewhat short life is now over, two years before everyone else my age. I wept because I realized that I'm not coming back. That day of realization came too soon for my young mind to comprehend. Which is why it hit me so hard the other day.

My bestfriend's boyfriend said that once I was gone I wouldn't want to come back. I find that hard to believe, seeing as how I don't really want to leave. I don't want to grow up and get a job, or go to university, or...the list goes on.

Call me nieve. Tell me I don't know how to spell while your at it. I LIKED being ignorant of all the things that people who are over the age of twelve have to deal with. I LIKED the feeling that the street that I lived on was the only street in the world and everything revolved around what I did when I went out to play, how many times I fell and skinned my knees, or watching the wind move the tree's leaves and the shade that it formed. I didn't understand most things, and I didn't want to. And now I am faced with yet another thing that is going to force the ignorance I want back further away. I don't want to think anymore about how our planet is going down the tubes, or about how President "W" could very well start World War III with these stupid stunts he's pulling with the Chinese. I don't want to care.

Will I one day return to my childish ignorance? Probably, since I'm a mildly firm believer in reincarnation. But then I'll loose it again when I'm forced to grow up in my new life. In this life, however, I will never regain that which I seek. That which most of us seek, what many of us secretly yearn for as we suffer the ever increasing burden of responsibility. Our return to ignorance. The want to retrieve that feeling that nothing except your small circle of life ever happens, to get that drowsy feeling when you sit under a tree in the summer time, listening to the wind in the leaves above you. To watch birds flying through the air and dream of joining them, to see a single flower in all its glory, gently bobbing in the breeze that's cooling you down as you lie in the soft grass.

For now, however, I must be content with my memories of that more blissful time, when the thought of homework never entered my mind. I must steel myself to continue working through this mechanized life that everyone lives in so that I can do something with my own life other than sit in ignorance under a tree in the summer time, watching the small Mysteries of the Earth play out before me. Perhaps one day I will return to this, but not now, and not today.

Not today.