All Up To Us

Once upon a time

We believed in dreams

And in fairytales

Where there’s always a happy ending

We dreamed of living a life

With no pain,

No tears

No chance of failure

And we held on to those images

Of the small cottage

With the white picket fence

The sun shining down on our smiling faces

And the faces of our loved ones

Until reality hit

Like a train, fast and deadly

With almost no warning

Just a horn in the distance

Coming to tear away our dreams

And our childhood

As it rushed by us

Leaving us crushed in its wake

Suddenly, we realized

Life isn’t easy

It isn’t a fairytale

There isn’t always a happy ending

And we don’t always get what we want

We realized that we had it good

When we were children

Playing all day

Without any worries of the future

No responsibility placed on our tiny shoulders

Believing that life is fair and just

And love always rings true in the end

And that train

That train that we never saw coming

Or didn’t want to acknowledge

Brought with it the responsibility of choosing a college

Deciding what to do with our lives

Learning to deal with the fact that

One day we would be on our own

In tiny apartments

In a big city

Where the sun doesn’t shine every day

Where the bills need to be paid

Where people walk in and out of our lives

And never stay as long as we want them to

The impact of growing up

Of having that train pass by

Of changing and maturing

Of parents saying

It’s all up to you now

Is unbelievably terrifying

But we’re strong enough

To get through the hard times

And get to the good times

And maybe, just maybe

We’ll get to live our dreams

Just like how we imagined

When we were children

Because it’s all up to us now