A rose is the ultimate token of love, isn’t it? This tatty old plastic rose is a painful reminder of my youth. I personally can’t understand why people want to be young again. All the pain you go through in your teenage years. The longing for acceptance and respect. You want to be different and stand out, but at the same time you want to fit in and be exactly like everybody else. What a dilemma. No way would I want to go through that again.
I don’t know exactly how I obtained this rose. I can’t remember whether I bullied the person into handing it over to me or not. My memory about this has faded, but the pain I feel when I look at it suggests that it was not given to me voluntarily. I know who I got it from and I remember the situation. It was at one of those travelling fairgrounds with a shooting booth. Teenage crowd, typical situation: girl loves boy, boy loves another girl, the other girl couldn’t care less and second boy loves first girl, all without anybody really knowing what love actually means. Everything happens in secret, well hidden, or so they think, convinced that nobody except themselves knows, despite it being so blatantly obvious.
As you grow older you watch the next generation repeating the pattern. And just like we were, they are convinced nobody will notice. What can the old folks possibly know about the pain of searching for true love. Weren’t they born old?
What is most surprising though, is that for some people it never seems to end. Watch people in the rest home… It goes on, the craving for respect and acceptance and the search for this one special person.
dedepuppets 
Der Vater einer Freundin, die in Scheidung lebt sagte, als seine Ehefrau nach gemeinsamen 60 Jahren verstarb: einen Partner zu finden, mit dem es so passt, ist wie ein Lotto-6er im Leben.
Ja, und Teenager mag ich auch keiner mehr sein – Wäähhhh! Aber bei Mitte 30 stehenbleiben hätte ich nichts dagegen gehabt :-)
Es ist schon was besonderes wenn man den einen Menschen wirklich trifft!
Ab Mitte 30 kann man ans stehenbleiben denken aber auf garkeine Fall früher.. Ich persönlich bin immer noch der Meinung dass das Leben wird mit dem Alter immer besser, Aber irgendwann wird wohl der Punkt kommen an dem es nicht mehr zutrifft (Hoffentlich dauert es noch eine Weile).
With sons of my own…it’s interesting re-living benchmark life moments through their eyes. I was so oblivious and naive towards most everything that I recall my adolescence as being relatively pain free. In my case, ignorance was bliss. Now that we live in the information age, so much more is complicated.
You must have been one of the lucky ones. Even though I was oblivious to a lot of things myself I was a poor communicator and very well aware of this.Communication is everything and you are right even more so now than when we were young.