When you’re forced to grow young, it ruins everything, everything. Everything that it means to be a kid. Let’s take the simple idea of going to a friend’s house for a couple hours to just “chill”. You can’t go. Well, physically you can go to their house but you can’t chill. You understand? Everything that chillin’ encompasses is now rendered moot because you’re so damn preoccupied with your own miserable life- and, by the way, having a miserable life is the cause of growing up fast. You can’t enjoy playing videogames with your friend because you can’t help but notice that the console itself doesn’t have that food stain on it because your father didn’t throw his dinner plate at it last night then throw the chair into the wall then storm out of the house to get a drink. You can’t go into your friend’s room without noticing that there’s a dollar bill left out in the open and not hidden because your friend doesn’t need to hide things from your theft of a mother. You can’t even stay too long at your friend’s house because you need to go and buy groceries for the week for you and your younger sister- otherwise you, well, wouldn’t eat at all. And then you need to remember now to spend all of the money you do still have on groceries because the rest of your family will need it. Not for the necessities of course, that’s your job, no, for gas so that your mother can drive down the casino with her friends and gamble it away. So that your grandmother can use it to pay for your sister’s dance classes- the one chance your sister has to escape the hell that is your reality; so that your father can afford to drive an hour away back to his house in a different city entirely so that he can hide and not burden himself with any sort of responsibility. That’s chillin’. Wait until you go back home.