March 2025

Being in your 20s is weird. Free from the shackles of childhood, we stumble into the wide world, marvelling at everything under the sky as our wings are finally free to soar. But this freedom comes at a price. Everything we’ve ever known is changing. Those places only we know, the quiet streamside, the hidden grottos, those silent arcades have all begun to fade into the summer sun and winter wind, as the endless march of time sweeps them away.

Our friends step further away, into the murky unknowns of their future as we meet the masses that we drown in, just another face in a bleak world. There is no more certainty, no more promised future summers, only the time that we claw and scrape and beg to try to even find another moment where we can see each other through those cobwebbed memories of childish promises. The music we listened to, the shows we watched, the books we read, all swept away into the dusty archives to be held in memories of sunlit libraries in the corners of classrooms, of adless web pages on broken screens, of quiet songs in the shade of a gum nut tree.

The 20s are a reminder that just like all that comes before, everything we know will never be the same again. And yet somewhere, we must find the strength to let go, to spread our wings and fly. To let go of everything to be left with something, knowing that we will be unable to return to this Eden in the setting sun, to find a new normal in the unknown.