~*3 Doors Down, "Ticket to Heaven"

They never told you to read the fine print when you gave your life away. They never warned you that the cost of doing that which you were best at would be everything else you could ever know. They never said that the price of being special was being terribly alone every second of your life. There were a lot of things they never said that you're only finding out now.

In this country, in this city, you're barely old enough to buy a drink. And yet everyone that knows of your existence is seeing you as the best thing to come along. Ever. They sing your praises, they expect you to save them right this very second. They don't understand what it's like to be you. They don't know what you've lost, what you gave up, to get to this point. They see you only as a superstar, as the symbol of their hopes and dreams in this hoop world. They expect nothing more than the best of you- that's all right, because you can only expect the best of yourself- but they want nothing more than the sun, the moon, the stars, and a title. Never mind how young you are. Never mind that this is a new situation for you, never mind how far you are from home, none of that matters to them because they want, they need, to see you as the only thing that can save them.

You were too young to understand what you were getting into when this all started. You thought it was the best thing ever, to be one of the top players. But what happened in school? One girl's excuse for missing class might be that her mum was sick and she had to take care of her; you excused yourself by saying that there was a Junior National Team practice halfway across the country. Or that you were overseas with the senior national team, winning medals. You were a teenager still when they hailed you in Sydney, when people you'd known in classes were going on to University. Even in a school devoted to sport, where the best students played in the pro league, you were head and shoulders above the rest, and no one ever let you forget it. No one understood how cold and lonely it could be to be that pinnacle. The worst part was that they thought they understood because they were chosen for that school, but they didn't. They only felt the stress of being good; you had the entire program scrutinizing you, waiting for you to falter and hoping you wouldn't because then they could keep pushing you and pushing you further and further until you finally broke, but it wouldn't matter to them then because they would have gotten what they wanted out of you.

You never broke. You never let yourself break, or maybe your family wouldn't let you break; then again, your family never tried to stop them either. Everyone wanted you to be the best basketballer that you could be, including you, but you never thought about simply being the best teenager you could be. You didn't have time for anything other than practice and homework. You didn't have your ring of girlfriends, trips to the main streets to look at clothes. You didn't have gossip at lunch, or any of the other things you've heard that girls your age got. Back then, you didn't think it mattered. But that was then, this is now; you see in the mirror a woman grown old before her time with the stress and the strain, never allowed to be immature because immaturity would have gotten you in trouble because from the time you hit your growth spurt they knew you were going to be something special. It was in your genes, your blood, your destiny. People look at you now and marvel at your exuberance, at how silly you can be at times; it's because you never got to let off that steam when you were supposed to. You can't get away with going crazy the way you want to, never will be able to now that you're the best thing since sliced bread, not when leagues all over the world are clamoring for your services; you can't allow that kind of stuff to get on your record, not even a little bit.

Once upon a time you dreamed of love, dreamed of someone you could share your life with. You see now that it's a one in a million chance; you've seen your teammates marry and divorce, spouses unable to handle the stress of long-distance relationships, prospective partners scared away by the thought of being second fiddle. You've seen it from a distance as well, not just from personal experiences. Very, very few people can balance love and basketball, despite what the movies say; invariably it comes up that there has to be a choice, either the lover or the game. Some can choose to leave basketball behind and devote themselves to the person that they love, but more often than not you see relationships crumble, families sundered, single parents depending on those kin who pushed them to play in the first place for support for the children in the middle. And that was the beginning of the end of your illusions about the wonderful life that you were leading. It wasn't the last straw, but instead the first.

The depressing part is that you realize your story has been told over and over again. Make a few cosmetic changes- to the name, the age, the sex, the sport- and you could be another of the hundreds of athletes who gave their lives to their careers. Every sport has them. Maybe when you looked at them and felt pity, that was when you knew that you were one of them, one of those people that someone could look at and pity even as they envied you. Your fame, your talent, your life- all a double-edged sword, because while your talent and your skill for the game have led you to pinnacles that you never would have seen otherwise, they also isolated you from almost everyone your own age, left you lonely, left you to grow up too fast.

And people say that, they talk about how they can't believe you're so young, that you have the poise of someone five, ten years older, but they don't think about it; you've been doing this since you were fourteen, fifteen, their stars only start at eighteen or nineteen, and even then only if they're something special. You've got five years more experience than someone your age should. You never got to be a stupid teenager. You didn't know then that you'd miss the opportunity.

They offered you the opportunity of a lifetime, the kind of thing that kids all over the world dream about. You were willing to take it. You didn't know what would happen. Not until you saw it happen to someone else. You once believed that everything you did you did because you wanted it more than anything, but now you wonder if you were led to believe that this was what you wanted. You don't know, because you can't go back and change the past. Maybe you wouldn't have been happy developing in the ordinary time. Maybe you would have been bored out of your mind spending time with people your own age whose concerns didn't even extend past the walls of the school. Maybe the only thing you would have dreamed of was the day you would be able to play with the adults. You don't know, but you'd like to have experienced it a little bit instead of being treated like the best thing to happen to basketball in a very long time.

You'd like to have known at some time or another that there was something more out there than the game. You're only finding out now how much there is out there. Some of it you discovered through the game, since you would never have gotten to do so much traveling as a private citizen, nor would you have come to the big leagues. But you're already becoming jaded and cynical, though few are those who are allowed to see it. You're too young for this. You're too young to think of the world in such terms. But that's the way of it when someone is thrown into the adult world far too young; your young eyes saw what they didn't want you to see, and now you understand it.

They gave you a ticket to heaven, to everything that you dreamed of. But the price was so high that it could only be paid if you didn't know what it was. The price is loneliness. The price is binding your life to the game until the day you die. The price is aches and pains from your neck down to your toes, in every joint, in the long bones of your long legs that already hurt before you've turned twenty-five. The price is your mind, body, and soul; everything you were and could have been, everything you are and could be, everything you will be and everything you might be.

So now you're left to wonder- a ticket to heaven or a ticket to hell?