Bathroom Monologue: Call of the Child

I was 22 the last time I felt the urge. I looked out my dorm window, at the empty soccer field, and immediately checked around my room for a makeshift sword. A cardboard tube or a stick would do. I'd just edited a hundred pages of my thesis in a four-hour marathon session, so my lucidity was certainly suspect. I caught myself as I checked behind my desk for a cable that might double as a whip, and realized how absurd I was being. It was a familiar urge, but one I hadn't felt in years. Probably not since I'd graduated highschool had I heard the call of the child, the strong desire to go outside and play. This urge to stomp around near the woods and slay imaginary dragons was at least as strong as any urge to get laid that I'd ever experienced. It was just different, associated with a far lower level of maturity in my brain - an embarrassing level of immaturity that today I'm willing to say also should be associated with all urges to get laid. The call of the child was something I'd heard and answered almost every day in my childhood, up until my friends and classmates hit the plane of amateur cynicism that made them try to act older than they were at the expense of everything they actually enjoyed. From that age on, I barely ever patrolled my backyard for monsters or supervillains. Like others, I sublimated the urge with sports, videogames, movies and books, which might have been supposed to wean me from the desire, but mostly starved it. Softball isn't an adequate replacement for high fantasy in the county woods, no more than the keyboard I used at 22 was a replacement for a marble composition spellbook. I think I heard the call again today. A shame it was cold outside.