I was a child.

I was a second grader in a cozy little house with those shining multicolored lights and sweets every day. I do not remember much apart from that. I do not remember what happened to me, but I know it happened and all of a sudden I was not a child anymore.

I found out at school, when the teachers huddled up us girls to talk of something important. That is when I found out it was wrong, and I think I broke that day. I do not remember that day very well either. I didn't quite understand anything, I was a child, wasn't I?

I didn't tell anyone, I am so good at keeping secrets... but it itched at my throat to scream, to claw at it all with half-chewed fingernails and pure rage. Claw till it bleeds, I couldn't do so, so I chose to claw at myself instead. Then the pills were downed in the belly of the monster, and it was all over in a disgusting pile of mud and ash.

But it wasn't. It never was, it never will be, not till I'm alive.

If I count, two, three, ten, seventeen, it doesn't seem much in the grand scheme of things. There have been wool-wrapped babies, meant to be cradled in their mothers' arms, but are probably nothing more than a feast for the insects, grass and fishes. There have been fathers and teachers and aunts and grandparents and- God, spare us... But I hold on, even if I say I've grown used to them, because that is what a child does, right?

Am I a child?

Children aren't supposed to see them tear at their scalps till black rips to red, aren't supposed to see photographs garlanded of people they once knew, aren't supposed to bleed of anything other than scraped knees on the pavement, aren't supposed to see what I have seen, to feel what I have felt.

I have grown up too fast...

I was a second grader in a cozy little house with those shining multicolored lights and sweets every day, when my childhood was taken. I fight for it back every single day from ghosts and forgotten memories.
And they have the gall to call me "weak", a crybaby, why can't I just "move on"?

The child in me is weak, but a child is never meant to be strong, they are meant to be safe.
The child in me still hides under blankets to be magically invisible, then there's Alter Ego bleeding out under the sheets. But all
I want is to sleep, I am so tired...

If my youth was never snatched from me, what kind of person would I have been? If I'd never seen the cruelty of coughs and fire, would I have been a better person?
What a waste of a life I have lived! We only get one, how I've ruined it! I've ruined it all, and now I want it to end, just end it before it gets worse, before I break, before anything and everything finds me hiding under my blue blanket.
If I were to be ash, I shall be loved the way I should have been, for I was just a child and I...

I shall be a child forever.
© Alter Ego