I Used To Believe

I used to believe in myself. And we all did at some point in time. Because children don’t internalize what they think and what they feel. They aren’t afraid to read you a chapter of their souls’. But then obscure conceptions of unspoken societal regulations demand your innocence and damn your childlike tendencies. We “grow up”. And anyone who stands up and says that they do, that they believe in themselves, they really do! Look at you. No you don’t. You may be young in years but those 16 years times 365 day that you’ve been here have aged your once pure eyes. And when I strip away your pigtails, all you are, all you’ll ever be, is 5,840 days broken. Wilted, and withered, and bleeding your childhood thoughts. Crying out of your now tired eyes, into your 8 million, 409 thousand, 6 hundred wrinkles. One for each day that you’ve been drained of your dreams. You don’t believe in yourself. You “grew up”.

Reviews

[Brandon]

I was thoroughly depressed after reading this. Which is precisely the effect you were writing for, and so I believe you have penned it down masterfully. I loved it. In a sad way. Like how you feel after watching a movie where the boy doesn't get the girl, but instead gets hit by a car and she gets a job at a Pick-N-Pull as revenge against automobiles and never marries, having promised her soul to the dead boy.

I'd be a hypocrite to say that I don't find myself hating the guy in the mirror for his jaded, quasi-spiritual, nuclear fallout maturity. I look back and seethe at who I was and lose sleep every now and then about who I could very easily turn out to be. But something that I've found comforting is this: in the eye of the Infinite and the Forever, we are and have always been children in clothes too big and ideas too small. Someday, I sincerely believe, though our hands drift wickedly to forbidden cookie jars, aging our skin and wrinkling our hearts, our Father will set us on His knee and make us all brand new. And then, inevitably, we will go out for ice cream and ask how come elephants never forget.