WHO STEALS OUR CHILDHOOD

 

It's all written down. There is nothing more to say. We all carry with us the child we once were. The pains, the joys, the discoveries, the dreams and the fantasies, everything is imprinted in this child. And we look at a child and we don't even dare look with eyes to see, really. The courage of a child who keeps everything, and often shares nothing, of their anxieties and fears, of what makes them tremble in the dark, like the color of the ghost, of the insults of adults, any adult, when dealing with a child. I saw a post a few days ago, a black and white photograph, by a professional  photographer, with four children that said something like: we should put a poster on the children, warning us of their fragility. Agreed. And I agree. But everything is dichotomous. On that poster, it should also talk about their fortitude. When he is silent and when he speaks, when he sleeps and when he lives. Every hurt adult has a hurt child. Everyone. No exceptions. And that's where empathy comes from. Understanding pain in others. From the mirror effect. To understand that we are all chests of experiences, some successful and others not so much. And when we pay attention, when we take our gaze seriously, we perceive, not only the march of time, but the shadow of that time that persists in the gaze, stubbornly persisting, stubbornly putting himself off for another day and a night and a week, a month and a year and ten years and a lifetime. When we grow up, we may have kept as many ghosts as we have. And to stop loving others because they forgot to love us. Or because they didn't find any reason to stay, because they didn't give the child a hand, on that day, at that hour, when the cloud-laden sky rained and collapsed on their innocence, on the recklessness or inconstancy of adults, adults who are often childish, who do not recover, only postpone, only prolong the anguish of their children, nephews, cousins, neighbors, relatives, teachers, friends, and the world insists on the adult to look, to look at himself through others, to look at his children carefully, to look at his parents and his brother, to look around, to awaken his conscience. Pain is a bogeyman older than death, and many times, when we forget to be present, aware, attentive, awake, it is this bogeyman who will give the hand to the child, the god will give. And there are so many children to God will give, and God is giving, but we are the ones who have to be present, awake, and when we are not, the pains and bogeymen of childhood grow and take divergent measures to love, to the health of feelings, of dreams. The dark is sometimes not the bogeyman. Sometimes the bogey is called father, cousin, uncle, teacher, doctor, mother, aunt, cousin, friend and so many other degrees of kinship and affiliation that the child believes that it is better to keep the pain than to expose it. The solution is often not found for their pain, but for its consequence, at the same time as it. The child is found with his pain already dead, the child dead, dreams are no longer called deceased, because they died many years ago, and when we can see, with eyes that want to see, many times, the child has already grown up, and has taken disruptive, destructive attitudes, for himself or for others. Or both. And how many times, that is to say, for the most part, the children are still inside the adolescents and the adolescents are still inside the adults, wounded, like birds with lead inside, with broken wings, that die slowly, in silence, without anyone hearing, that scream without a voice, without being able to cry, keep everything, swallow everything, as if everything were obligatory to swallow, as if it were normal to swallow. To such normalization of evil. And so many times, adults who carry hurt children and adolescents inside them become seniors full of sorrows and sourness, sad and discontented, of a persistent bitterness and we call them grumpy, they too have been taught to keep the schisms, the sadnesses, mixed with the tears and the prayers and the saints and the desperate prayers. And so many times, these seniors die alone, terribly alone, more alone than ever, sometimes it seems that neither pain is with them anymore, nor memory, nor the speed of thought, nor wrinkles, nor the wind can reach them and they flow into the earth, dry and barren, fertile and wet, it doesn't matter, it is a single body that lies,  just one more! Betrayed! One more body full of pains that did not give birth, that only hurt, that only grew and that could never be born, pains without a foreman, full of stickiness and without ever being seen, treated, observed, cured, one more soul that leaves full of ills, of pains without a subject, or, at most, anonymous subjects, but with a dreadful predicate,  smelly, bursting coffins, expelling earthworms, breaking bibles and sacraments, expanding in the next generations. When it is said of this or that child who is born with foresight, the boy, the girl, to carry munitions of war, to succumb on earth, we are saying that on this planet, the cult of hypocrisy continues, that only the courtesy of the name is human, that the subject is delicate, that the subject dies and that no more is talked about. Shut up. That it is a waste to say, as if heaven could hear, that that child was born in the absence of kinship, in the absence of happy adults, in the continuity of stepfathers and stepmothers of life, who pretend to be handsome, but are sly, who pretend to be distinct, but they're just dreadful! Let the pain be silenced, let it be forgotten, let it be forgotten, let it not be spoken again, let the misfortune be repeated again, in another generation, but the addiction to naming the pains should end. She died of a pain that was not hers. It was her mother's, her aunt's, her neighbor's, her friend or her mother's friend, her father's. But it wasn't hers. That this conjugation of pain should always be in the plural, because it seems to me that when pains are conjugated in the plural, that the thing is animated to the ideal solution, that there are more like that and that it is necessary to bring light more than a candle, more than a prayer, a seventh-day mass paid to the priest who has wronged him, another abnormality in oneself, already so abnormal, which is the solemn hypocrisy of forgiving with interest of arrears and fantasies the pedophiles who ass the boys behind the sacristy, but say nothing! Silence the name, unless it is a general evil, that more voices are raised after all, that a crowd is counted to realize that there is a social problem after all,  that of hurting children and believing that it doesn't hurt, that it doesn't hurt them, that it was, perhaps, accidental, punctual, colloquial to have put the poor boy in the tail, who even had a poor figure of rhetoric, the typical dysfunctional family, come on, this one can be hurt, it doesn't do worse than what he lives, let it serve as an experiment,  that serves as an ornament, a testament, an inheritance from a convent or monastery, the mortar boy, predicted to be, deceived, raped, spitted, asphyxiated, silenced! Boy, be quiet! Pray three Hail Marys and two of our fathers and you already know, when the day is setting, come to church, come to school, to your uncle, to your cousin, to the hell that breaks you, that even being born with foresight, it is not enough for you to be a boy, you also need to be lucky! Rather death!  And many die, continuing to breathe, many die, strangling the truth of the sick, depressed, chronic, sad and strangled society, which continues to walk after the scandal at the door, inside the door, in the bedroom, in the living room, in the school, in the church, in the convent, in the parliament, and persists, insists, keeps the villains loose, decorated, disguised as humans, The institution retracts and continues to violate, but for the time being more discreet, society pretends to sympathize with the child's pain, but it must retract itself in a different way, it must say to itself: better him than me, better him than mine, before you than us, and in that before, it continues, in the dead of night, in the dead of day, In the holes, behind the doors, pain continues to take hostages, who grow sick, who grow sad, discontented who carry lead in their wings, who die even before the final judgment, who push themselves in shame, in fear of reprisals, who hide, who omit themselves, but who never vomit and dye the sacred fabric of institutions full of vices and malice,  of sins and of our fathers! Hunger, lack of cleanliness in the house, lack of tact, homelessness, all these faults do not cause as much pain as the lack of modesty and empathy in today's solemn and hypocritical society.