A kid again... A kid always...

Mom’s bedroom floor at home
12:27am December 29, 2009


I’m sitting on the floor of my mom’s enormous room (She renovated the house in 2003 and seriously, I’ve had whole apartments half the size of this room) while Ate surfs the net from mom’s bed and Mom wraps gifts on the floor 2 meters away. Man, I feel like a kid again! More so now than usual. Maybe is the magic of the holidays. Maybe it’s being home-home, and not in the foreign addresses I call home when I’m abroad. I love being a kid again :)

People I meet now call me Jacques. But the people I grew up with call me Jappy/Japs/Japster. Hahaha… I love that name! JAPPY!!!! I think it’s fitting coz it’s so happy! I’m that adolescently awkward, annoyingly overactive, dark skinned, buck toothed little scoundrel of my youth. Underneath this 20 something year old exterior is the still the heart of a pubescent high school grasping at the straws of youthful virility to battle the everyday angst and chaos of adulthood.

I was staring at myself this morning (as I do pretty much every morning since I started to work out a few months ago… Hahaha, dotcha love ‘em “just got out of bed” abs), and I was thinking in my head… who the hell is that adult man staring at me? As I look a little closer, I figure it out… It’s like that scene from the movie, Hook, where that little white kid tugs and pulls on Robin Williams’ face and say, “There you are Peter!” Somewhere behind those deep-set eyes and disheveled hair is that insecure brace-face kid in the oversized Gap t-shirts and 1-size too big polo sneakers (coz the grown-ups always buy kids clothes that are bigger than what is normal so we can grow into them…).

Yup, sometimes I can be a big kid… Innocent and naïve. Idealistic and bright-eyed. Energetic and larger than life. Free-spirited, carefree and adventurous. And I love that. I miss that. But alas, the age of innocence apparently has an expiration date and all will inevitably take a bite from that apple. And that’s where I am now – a kid who looks like an adult, pretending to be an adult, living in an adult world… But beneath these (slightly uneven) doe eyes is a simple boy smiling for no apparent reason. Easily forgetting the painful, and dwelling in an unexplainable feeling of juvenile contentment. Happy just to be…




Photos ripped from my man, Mr. Daniel Gimenez - www. danielgimenez.com