Dear Innocence,
I apologize for my clichéd love letter. I apologize for repeating the feelings of others as I write this to you. But since your loss, something is missing. The child inside me has died. Suddenly the once bloated balloon of fantasies and childhood creativity has become only a rubbery corpse. The world became coated in a thick layer of suffocating dust, and I’m tired. I became a passive observer, watching and writing about the world through gray, unfeeling spectacles, and I’m tired. I have been instilled with this perpetual melancholy, the red paint that seeps through the white overcoat and can never be covered, and I’m tired. I’m so tired. And it has gotten to the point where if the cold river asked for a kiss I would abide, not out of overwhelming urge but out of a chance to be blinded and ignorant once again, inside a new body with a feeble brain and a selfish heart. And oh sweet innocence, oh the warm cocoon that feeds the young butterfly before it is released into the frigid air, and oh the same cocoon that withers and dies when the butterfly returns to beg for comfort once again, when I lost you, the sun lost its magnificence, and my story is only an afterthought in the expansive abyss that was once home.