It was like waking up.

Like everything hadn’t been real before.

The daze of childhood,

Of comfort, protection, and sheltering,

Of a primitive sense of control even,

Vanished.

Like a hard blow to a white dandelion,

It was there and then it was gone.

 

A girl began it actually.

Ending it is how it began

A year’s worth of investment

No thought, no reason, no shame.

It’s over she said,

You’re not worth it anymore.

Ouch.

Pretty tough for any man to hear.

A boy couldn’t handle it.

That’s how I knew,

The boy was departing from here

 

And, with the beginning barely begun,

I stood at the 30-yard-line,

With family and friends huddled around.

Disparaged by embarrassment, disappointment, and despair,

I wished I had stayed on the ground.

Homecoming is supposed to be fun.

But not when you drop two touchdown passes,

Especially,

Not when the number of those guarding you was none.

 

I could hear it.

The rush of air.

Perhaps it was clammering alumni,

Concluding their reunions.

Nope.

Too charitable.

The lungs were contracting

And tickle of the air was less than pleasant.

 

I could recover from self-loathing,

And perhaps from a team’s disappointment,

But what I had not expected

Was a multi-faceted attack

From the reporting department.

Journalists, “grown adults,”

Had gathered their thoughts.

Plastering them everywhere.

Twitter.

Newspapers.

Purported their insults:

Sick, pathetic

“Varsity” failure makes a fool of himself.

Double ouch.

There it is again,

That generous wind,

And subsequent white cloud that follows me.

 

But that’s not all.

I wasn’t a man yet.

You can’t look your enemy in the eye

Until you know all that you’re fighting.

I had only 3/4s of his face revealed.

The deathblow to my childhood was the secret.

That’s when the last of seeds were freed.

 

I did not read the papers or read the tweets.

But my parents and my coaches and my teammates,

They knew.

Two weeks later one of them slipped.

Like a banana peel on rainbow road,

It sent us over the edge.

The conspirators had lost their cover,

And I had learned,

that they did not trust me consequences of my own failure.

I failed in the relationship, football and being an adult

Triple ouch.

 

That was enough,

No longer would I be caressed as a child.

That’s when I took my stand.

The protective dandelion of my childhood wilted,

Never to blossom again.