When we drove through my hometown for the first time, I asked her, "What do you see?"

And she stared at the setting Ohio sun, at the too cold outside with not enough snow, at the streets I called home.

"Old houses," she said first. "With peeling paint, dead grass for yards. Keep out signs and beware of dogs, rich and modern neighborhoods shoved next to the older ones."

A pause and she looked again. "Bricks. And trees. There's not a yard without a tree here."

"Anything else?" I asked, turn signal pointing me right. Towards home.

"No. Looks like rain though."

"Hm." The turn was made and I relaxed into the wheel. I hated turning. "I'll tell you want I see, yeah?"

"Go ahead."

"These old houses, they hold memories. There are names carved into the wood, finger paint and crayon marks on walls, and whole lives embedded in that chipping paint." The light turned red at the cross road before my old high school's road. I did not look down that road, never will again.

"We keep to ourselves, keep out the people we don't want." I continued driving at green. "Scare them away with dogs we don't have. Scare ourselves with the big new buildings that don't fit in with our common structure, the architecture alien to our town."

"We call the street just down this way," I pointed. "Wall Street. Not it's real name, but only the rich live here and just behind them is everyone else. The cracked paint over cracked bricks, demolished for the white walls to take over."

I pulled down my family's drive. I learned to bike on this drive. "There used to be cornfields and trees here. Dug 'em up for all of those ugly houses."

"There's still so many bricks. So many bricks and trees." We pulled in front of my childhood home, white with a fence and a dog waiting in the front yard. There used to be two waiting when I came home from school.

"I used to climb that tree," I said as we get out of the car and walked toward the gate of my childhood home. "Do you see what I see now?"

It started to rain as we crossed the cobblestones. "Yes," she said, jacket pulled over her head and her hand slipping into mine. "Yes, I do."

She pulled me back before I opened the door. "When we go to mine, I'll tell you everything I see. Everything." She blinked her eyes, wide and big, at me. Her hair was going to crystalize in the wet and the cold.

"Okay," I said, my wet hair beginning to plaster to my face. "I would love that."

"So long as you drive."

"Yes," I laughed as I pushed open the peeling yellow door. "So long as I drive."

Hope you all

Are having some good cheer

Please remember 

People struggle during this time of

Year

Happy days to all

Old tales and stories of years passed

Little smiles mean everything

I love to see how joy lights up the faces of

Daughters and sons and children and parents

All around the

Year there’s reasons to have cheer

So happy holidays whatever you may celebrate

Dear World,

I am teenager. I am on the cusp of life, a time when my entire life is ahead of me yet I am beginning to feel as if some parts of it are behind me. 

Now more than ever I am fielding questions about my future. Where will I go once I leave high school? What will I do for a living. Now more than ever my answers to those questions seem like they came from a politician to a journalist than a student taught to always use evidence and analysis to prove a claim.

I am at a time where I am told that I am still a kid. My adulthood is not valued like that of others. I'm not a grown up, and I am not treated as such, but I am expected to act as one. 

My protests to such unfair treatment are shunned away. "Life's unfair, kid, deal with it."

The simple naïvety of that statement angers me. The statement itself isn't untrue - its the suggested fix for that reality which it confirms as true that does. "Deal with it" worked in the 1930s when millions of Americans faced unemployment because of an economic disaster the United States hasn't seen since. I can not be expected to "deal" with life like they did.

With all potential avenues for my life, there is a large chance that I will not end up leading a successful life. Generations prior to mine have screwed up the system so badly that for me to make a comfortable living with or without a college degree will be nearly impossible. And now it's up to me to "deal with it"? Hogwash!

If the success of your children are so important to you, then why is it that all of life's issues must rest on the shoulders of the children who will find it hard to simply get by under this system you have created?

For all my life I have attacked the challenges that face me with a sort of unwavering optimism. I do not intend on changing that tradition. But moving into adulthood is something that seems almost unwinnable for a teenager like me. No matter what I do I will fail. Prices are so expensive that owning a home in my future is as much a dream as any young child's ambition to become an astronaut, a firefighter, a police officer. . . 

So I guess, world, I have you to thank for this. Please, continue to lay the problem of climate change, homelessness, and the affordability crisis on my generation's shoulders. You created the problem, so why should you fix it? Besides, we're already doomed to fail anyway, so we might as well make our failure count and make it a big one at that.

Yours truly,

every single teenager who does not come from a well-off family

I just need a paper and some pencils. 
Maybe some pillows. 
And a cozy light. 
Then, maybe I could live there           like in the story books.                       Share a house with the main character as I weave her story from the Narrator's point of view.                                          Hop through                                             the glowing woods                                with the frogs and elves.                         Or stay in a jeweled tower with the empress.                                              As if. It's nice to dream though.