To Youth

The other day I was thinking about my youth. The youth when you turned up to a party; and the parents were there giving out cake. The youth when you were scared someone would notice if a stubby lager was missing from the crate of 20, and the youth when you were more than happy to be somewhere without girls.
I remember dreading Sundays as it meant more school. School. You don’t miss it until you have left, not so much the teaching, but the fact you could go and see your mates everyday while doing next to no work and still able to scrape through the exams.

The weekends when you wouldn’t wake up hung-over or lie in bed all day, but do something more creative. Go to the woods and build something then tear it to the ground in frenzy. The weekends when you would skate through sun, through rain, through snow because the feeling you got from stepping on those layers ply and kicking off with your shoe was the greatest you could feel. The bruises, cuts and broken bones you would get and show off like a trophy. I remember the thrill I would feel from landing a trick for the first time. The thing that sticks out the most in my head has to be the first time I dropped in.
The bruises on my arse, knees and hips screaming in agony as I landed on them for the 5th time consecutively. The adrenaline racing through me as I each fall got me closer to my goal. Then, after more than an hour of trying I finally rode it out to the other side. The cheers from people on the 4 ft ramp who were with me throughout the ordeal were deafening, the crashing of ply and trucks on coping and woops from my friends. That one moment in time opened the doors for a lot of things for me. I gained the confidence to learn more lip tricks and drop bigger and bigger ramps.
So here I raise my glass to youth, to the kids who never give up, to the kids who struggled on, and to the people like myself, who miss the innocence of it all.