childhood

I glanced in the first open door and stopped short. Desks. Four tiny desks. A wall of faded posters of alphabet animals. A blackboard, still showing the ghost of numbers. I blinked, certain I was seeing wrong.Derek nudged my legs, telling me to get moving. I looked at him, and I looked at the classroom.This was where Derek had grown up. Four tiny desks. Four little boys. Four young werewolves.For a second, I could see them__hree boys working at the three clustered desks, Derek alone at the fourth, pushed slightly away, hunched over his work, trying to ignore the others.Derek nudged me again, whining softly, and I looked down to see him eyeing the room, every hair on his neck on end, anxious to get away from this place.

It felt now as if I'd never known them and I couldn't know them again. It seemed to me that whatever had existed back in the place where I'd grown up was so far away now, impossible to retrieve.

People will drive by their high school ten years down the road, just so they can pretend that thinking "not much has changed" is actually true. When really, everything has changed. The air smells the same, but the roads have cracked more. The roads have cracked so much they now look like the skin on a crocodile's back. And all the fields, green in the summers, golden in the autumns, have all been paved over with new reasons to never come back.

And my seven-year-old world humpty-dumptied, never to be put back together again.

Ever since the beginning of the middle-class era, with its faith in progress, belief in progress has dominated the upbringing of children too. Childhood now came to be understood only as the preliminary stage on the way to the full personhood of the adult_ Every lived moment has an eternal significance and already constitutes a fulfilled life. For fulfilled life is not measured by the number of years that have been lived through, or spent in one way or another. It is measured according to the depth of lived experience.

There is nothing romantic about childhood. Children can enjoy their childhood only if the adults create the necessary atmosphere.

If you ever want to see heaven, watch a bunch of young girls play. They are all sweat and skinned knees. Energy and open faces.

People say they miss the deceased. I missed my father and my mother when they were still fully alive. They travelled through my childhood in the same way they moved around the hotel: my mother industrious, hurried, hidden; my father drunk, flamboyant, alone.

And what do I know about humans? Only this: My name is Doloria Maria de la Cruz, and I'm not just the end of childhood. I'm the end of humanity. And if you come from the skies- I'm coming for you.

My cousins had told me dead people came back as Dracula.Draculas got thirsty at night and drank only blood, leaving themilk and juices in the refrigerator for the house owners. I thoughtDraculas were cool, they had some manners. Still I didn__ like theidea of anyone drinking blood.

Children with less opportunities often become adults with more flexibility.

Often, under the layers of our maturity is a child__ insecurity screaming for love and attention.

The girl looks out the window, watching the gentle, familiar blue sky fade into darkness. The stars come out, slowly at first and then all together, diamond-bright, each one a new world to discover.But no matter how long the girl looks, she feels nothing. Puzzled, she looks for the girl who wanted to be an explorer, the girl who wanted to learn deep-sea diving and mountain-climbing, the girl who wanted to travel the stars. But she can't find her. That girl died when her parents did, in a little shop in the slums of November. And now she has no soul left to shatter.She closes the shade over the window.

To be moved confuses the soul. One cannot convey these kinds of memories any more than the events of a dream......if I have complained too long, it is because my memory, no longer having any fixed abode, has to carry its luggage with it.

Adults were constantly auditioning, but for what?

Childhood was the germ of all mistrust. You were cruelly joked upon and then you cruelly joked. You lost the remembrance of pain through inflicting it.

A team goes through stages of birth, childhood, puberty, adolescence, maturity, and aging in its development.

To all the boys, for when you become men: you'll leave women all throughout your life because they're holding you back, and even after she's gone she'll still weigh you down. To all the women: stay away from us men. We don't know anything about you, despite what we try to convince you of.