Ivy Grew Over the Street Sign

The backyard is empty. All of us neighborhood kids used to play out there, but we're not those kids anymore; we're high school teens with "opinions". We vote straight-ticket for death or war, since that one candidate we read about on CNN.com seemed nice and all our friends are Democrats anyway. We think we're qualified, we puff out our chests and call ourselves responsible citizens. Being closed-minded is an art we've all perfected, and we paint murals of ourselves as the exception to the rule. What we refuse to accept is that we are not the exception. What we don't say is that we made the rule.

I used to jump on the trampoline in my backyard with my sister. Now it's full of seventeen year olds laying side-by-side, layer-on-layer, trying to accidentaly touch each other and accidentaly stick their tounge in each other's mouths. Hey, it's a crowded trampoline, things happen. Down the street my best friend Johnny- the one I married in second grade and the first boy I ever hugged that wasn't in my family- smokes up with his friends. They take hits and listen to Brand New, and I never told him that I think his new hair makes him look like a girl because maybe that's what he was going for. I don't know these people anymore, and whoever they are now are only ghosts of the kids that used to play in the street. Now we're the ones interrupting football games when we drive our cars down the road; we're the ones waking up the neighborhood with drunken ramblings. We're the ones broken by hope and deserted by faith; we fit the stereotype and we love it. 

In the end, we are all the same.