Nothing can ruin our happiness right now.

We are a hybrid generation born on the cusp of reality, at the intersection where taking a guilt trip down memory lane just might be our last refuge. My generation, with minds in a permanent state of defeat against forgetting and unaccountable nostalgia for what never happened. A whole generation intoxicated by sadness and ruinous passion for life that burst into

existential crisis and

addiction

to devastation.

We are what is left.
 

You know, sometimes suffering is just suffering. It doesn't make us stronger. It doesn't build character. It only hurts.

We were born into the notion that it isn’t love if it doesn’t end with someone wearing an ER gown and a wrist tag.

Our collective pulse is a cry for help.

I've watched how we desperately try to fall in love with everything, all at once, because we are conditioned to believe that everything will leave us. The more we reach for the tangible the more likely we will have something, just one solitary thing, when all else evades us.

We amble on this planet, the common feeling: being locked out of a house at midnight. Searching for doors and secret passages, fumbling for keys and better lighting, some of us just give up or we sit outside on the porch, we seek someone to let us in. Maybe we cry, maybe we feel guilty. Why were we out so late anyway? Some of us don't go home. Some of us were always locked out.
But I think most of us feel like we are in a low budget music video. The weather is sepia tone, the colors muted, enough to keep you looking around, not enough to inspire. The stand-ins are your friends from elementary school; in the lyrics you admit that sometimes you use Febreze as perfume. You are content, but are tormented by a subversive cultural phenomenon that tells you it's not enough. 
This seed is planted and sown through the minds of our children, through this youth, through what you who are reading this would call posterity. 
If you are happy in this era and you know it then you must be really good at lying to yourself. If your default personality traits aren't narcissism, ambivalence, and self-loathing, then you must be living in oblivion. 
See, turn on the television, look at a magazine, and go on the internet- you deceive yourself.

Emptiness is worshiped;

vapid conversation is manufactured like the boring cereal you eat so you can fit into those jeans you never liked anyways.
We are what is left from this ruinous passion to collect names, and numbers, false friendships and something that feels a lot like apathy. We've watched hatred be awarded ribbons, we've seen prejudice commended, and we’ve watched justice fall to its knees at the mercy of intolerance.

My generation stopped being afraid of monsters under their beds when they realized they didn't care if they got them.
You can only live in deception for so long. 
 

We sigh and amble on. Because sighs are signs that our souls are searching, looking beyond for some greater truth, something more astounding, perplexing, and beautiful than the agony that has fermented us.
Some of us will be trapped, some of us will transcend. 
The transcendent have nebulas for the backgrounds on their cell phone’s lock screens. They are the thinkers, the rebels, the quiet, the sinners, the losers, the criers, the ironic, the winners.

We are here and we are waiting.

Varied and cultivated, split and euphoric. We keep thinking home is a place we can visit, only to remember that we belong to nothing, are tethered to no one, and are a conglomeration of listless voyagers on a solipsistic journey to nowhere. Content with our oblivion, nurtured by our parental stoicism, there are so many of us who have had curiosity bred out of our pedigree. Creativity and expression become laughable topics between one's technological prowess or another's scientific devoutness.
Remember, their are those of us who are still enrapt with the iridescent nebula on our electrical devices, we still wonder about car crashes, silence, last breathes, and violence.
We are at an intersection,
where the phrase " it is what it is,"
is no longer enough.
We will not go away.
No one can ruin our happiness right now.