World's Strictest Parents

God, you just want a fucking cigarette--to stick the crummy filter to your lips, slick paper gripping your skin, grind a flame from that little purple cylinder and suck in sweet tickling death with teenaged foreverness resilience.

You want to open a switchblade and expose every hole in their parenting wall. Must they insist toiling farm-labor to childly freedom-screams? No conversation as if perhaps equals on some less strenuous field? After all, remove time and there you have a playground of globular sorts (mostly water, several continents).

But their wall is solid, you see. Damn them! It's that exposed brick of the heart by which they warm their souls. Hard and old as it may be, the warmth is what is held in such high regard.