It’s late in the afternoon on the weekend. Alone in the house, you decided to clear out some of the mess in the rooms. Lots of junk has accumulated there, thrown around in boxes and hidden away in drawers and closets. You need to get rid of the trash anyway as well as prepare for your eventual move to a new place.

You open a drawer which contains a mess of papers, notebooks, and all sorts of litter. You look through them and see that you found a collection of drawings and writings from your childhood.

It really makes you think of the simpler times of your youth… well, not all of your childhood was what you’d like it to have been, but you then yearn for the times where you didn’t have to worry about things like work, money, and the other responsibilities of the world.

You feel the need to just crawl into bed, wrap yourself in your covers, and pretend that you’re shielded from the stress and problems of being an adult. You long to be hugged and embraced, being told that you’re loved and protected from the fears that haunt you. You dreamed of actually smiling innocently, having fun, lost in your naiveness. Heh, how silly and lame are you?, you think to yourself.

A sadness creeps over you when you try to think of anytime where you felt happiness when you were young. But no moment comes to mind. You don’t remember a time where you really loved being a kid. Were you in a rush to be an adult? Or was it filled with things that you forced yourself to forget?

You dig deeper into the pile and find one of your little notebooks that you had to write in in grade school. Looking inside sends you into an even deeper depression. The first subject you wrote about was a trip you took with your family to the aquarem (actually the aquarium, but you couldn’t spell that well at the age of eight). This was well before your parents separated. You look at the other page and see that you also drew a little picture of your family in pencil and crayons: father, mother, you, and your little sister. You laugh a little at how crazy, tense, and awkward it would be if you all get together like that today. Then you just stared at the picture, thinking about how happy you must have been to write about such a memory. And then you felt a rage to tear that book apart and forget that you ever found it.