The Innocence We Lost: Do You Remember?

You can be innocent again. It's not true, what they say, that you can never get it back. You can. It's only that most folks cannot be bothered. - Catherine M. Valente.

When I was younger, I would swallow fruit seeds and then get very scared that a tree would grow in my tummy. I'd put my arms into my shirt and tell people I lost my arms. I would try to make the light switch stay on both on and off at the same time. I used to think that the moon followed me wherever I went, that Santa Claus was God, and that a rainbow was a magic trick in the sky.

I had that one pen with six colors, and I would try to push all the buttons at the exact same time. I used to lick my ice-cream really slow, telling myself that it would never get finished. I believed that the world was perfect, that nothing was bad, and all that mattered was that next high from playing with my friends. Do you remember your childhood days? Those silly things we used to do way back then, now we look back and laugh at our ignorance, our innocence, how blissfully stupid we were. Do you remember?

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How did we change - from flying paper planes and driving paper boats in our bathing water - to this? When did we grow - from the innocence of our childhood days, that sweet ignorant optimism - to this? Can you put your finger on the day - when we stopped playing, when our childhood wasted away with our purity gone; when our dreams got smaller, and the pure unadulterated love in our hearts died down - to this? Remember when we were younger and we couldn't wait to grow up? What were we thinking?

Do you remember - running wild and free in the streets, without a care in the world? Tripping on tree roots and slipping on the muddy ground, but getting back on our feet and running all the same. Do you remember - dancing in the rain with the cold liquid pouring down on us, and we would open our mouths to taste the heavenly nectar on our tongues, because we thought water from the sky was sweeter? Do you remember - those days when all we had to worry about was our next meal, or what goody mummy was going to bring home from work, or when NEPA would bring the light so we could watch The Pinky and the Brain. Do you remember how those days used to feel like?

Wasn't it easier in your firefly catching days?
When everything out of reach someone bigger brought down to you; wasn't it beautiful running wild till you fell asleep, before the monsters caught up to you? - Taylor Swift.

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Now it's all gone, that magic is not there anymore. We worry about other things - how beautiful or handsome we look, we dislike our bodies and wished we looked a certain way. We look at the world today and see it as a burden, a sort of task. We drink ourselves stupid, and work ourselves dead all just because that's what mom and dad said we should do. There's always that bill we have to pay, that exam that we have to pass, that position we have to attain, that clothing item we would give anything to possess - that boy or girl we wished we were, that personality we wished we had.

Perhaps we got lost in translation, perhaps we got stuck in the grey areas between black and white, good and bad, right and wrong, and now we see too much, crave too much. Or maybe this world was a masterpiece until we "grew up" and tore it to pieces. Wasn't it beautiful when you believed in everything, and everybody believed in you? Now I know why Peter Pan didn't want to grow up..

You told us once not to be in such a hurry to grow up, but I don't see any way we could have avoided it. There was always someone out there ready to carve away another chunk of our innocence. Maybe because theirs was already gone and they couldn't stand the sight of our ignorant happiness. Because that's what innocence is, you know. A blissful oblivion of what's coming, of what you'll lose and what you'll gain, and what kind of person you'll grow up to be. - Laura Wiess.

It's so ironic that as a child, we can't wait to "grow up" and "mature". But when we finally grow, we realize that everything is not what it seems; we see that the world is not what we thought it was, that magic doesn't exist, and that our dreams are just that - dreams. Then we get angry. We get mad at the world and everything in it. We become bitter and frustrated and miserable, and we develop a warped sense of how the world is, and how human beings should interact with each other. Love becomes a distant memory, while hate and greed thrives.

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We wish we were happier and thinner and fitter, we wish we weren't loosers and liars and quitters; we want something more not just nasty and bitter, we want something real not just hash tags and twitter. - Passenger.

How I long to go back to those days of my childhood, and feel that magical feeling all over again. That I might once more see the world through the eyes of a child, and cherish the beauty of life a little more than I do now. I long for the days of my wide-eyed curiosity, my boundless optimism, and my ignorant beliefs. They may sound ridiculous to some, but at least back then, I had peace in my heart. And peace had me.

Do you remember when we were younger and we couldn't wait to grow up? What on earth were we thinking?