The most confusing thing about adulthood is going back to places you visited as a child and seeing how much smaller everything is.
I mean like physically smaller. Like. My old elementary school had cavernous halls and towering ceilings. My dad bitches about it being a rat warren. I went back recently and jesus christ it's like the entire building shrunk in the wash.
I think part of the entire trauma of being abused at home is the fact that the child is very often left with a choice between bad and bad. There is literally nothing you can do to make things right or good. You either answer the phone and get yelled at or you do not and get yelled at at home. You either spend lots of time outside of your room and get criticised constantly or you stay in your room and then get accused of staying in your room too much. You either nearly kill yourself trying to do perfect at school or you get punished for not doing it. There is no good choice, nothing depends on you, though abusers manipulate you into thinking that it does. But it doesn’t. And didn’t. And children can’t do anything to stop their parents from abusing them, from divorcing, from drinking, from beating them. Yes, you can tell the authorities if you’re old enough but it’s the same choice between bad and bad. None of it is the child’s fault but children are also built in such a way that they always think that it is, and that they can do something, become better, less visible, less real to stop all the bad things. But they cannot.
i think that every child should have unrestricted access to thick blackberry brambles or some other delicious fruit that grows encased in a painful fortress. i think wading through thorns to reach the cluster of shining ripe berries you spied through a gap between the tangled vines teaches you something important. not sure what though
i just know no fruit has ever tasted as sweet as the ones i ate while bleeding under the blistering summer sun
Children are the less free and most free people in the world I think. They have very little autonomy, they cannot choose where to live, how to live, with who to live, but their minds do not need liberation. They aren’t yet corrupted by fears, doubts, existential questions, responsibilities, expectations and other shit. I remember being a child and the thing I miss most about it is the absolute inner freedom. My mind was empty, but not in a bad way, in a beautiful way. It meant that I could fill it all over again every day. I could fill it with morning sunshine, with the stories I read, with the taste of strawberry ice cream, with freshly cut grass, with dry airplane air, with dreams. It wasn’t all perfect, of course. The world filled my head with my mother’s rage, with helplessness, with all the rot of school…but it never stayed for long. It never grew, it never turned into fear, into grief, into anger. Children are free of being chained by memories. That is what I miss most.
childhood friends are like open wounds
um seriously? like i haven’t seen you since i was seven and i love you with my whole heart. we stopped speaking because you hurt my feelings and i sometimes look at that bracelet we shared. there is no healing. there is no going back. there’s no knowing if they think about it as much. there is just nostalgia and aching when you walk past cherry trees
But then sometimes there is nothing to remind you of them but a blurred memory and a bad quality photo with half their face visible on it. It hurts to realise how vulnerable it all is and how easily it can erase from your mind and yet to never forget. I still remember the colour of your eyes and how you laughed on that one sunny Tuesday. Do you still remember me? Am I just a fading picture in your mind too? Or do I no longer exist there at all?
When I was little, the darkness was scary. It was huge and unknown, and empty. But when I looked at it, it stared back at me. Not something in the darkness but the darkness itself. When I was seven I couldn’t look at the ocean at night. I was a fearless child, but just seeing that blackness made me tremble and I knew not why. Recently I went to see the ocean again. I saw waves hitting the shore and then —nothingness. I looked into it but found a different kind of emptiness. I found that it had no invisible eyes, that the darkness doesn’t scare me anymore. But something left me with this fear. There was more comfort in the darkness when I was a child, too.
I used to live in Africa.
I used to live in Africa.
I used to breathe in the hot Nairobian air, let the warm wind kiss my cheeks and lips, run around under horrendous tropical rainstorms of the equator and swim in the glittering waters of the Indian Ocean in Mombasa.
The burning hot sun turned my blonde hair nearly white. It darkened my skin, painted it a totally new colour. It also changed what my soul was made of.
Africa tossed the cards of my heart and my life. These memories will never fade, this love for life that it gave me will never fully wither out.
I used to live in Africa.
But Africa still lives in me.
