I don’t need the fake reassurance now or the illusion that things will always be okay. I don’t need them to pretend to listen and I don’t need them to fail to understand again.

I’m not so sentimental anymore because we’re not the kids we were, we’re not all laughing on the playground thinking we’re invincible. We know all too well now that we’re not.

And maybe we never even were as perfect as we are in our memories, maybe things were always hard but all the sunny years melt together into a slurred montage of monkey bars and spelling tests.

I still remember sitting at the edge of the playground looking out across the cornfield at the old cemetery on the hill, not really thinking of anything but just wondering about everything and feeling something vaguely that I didn’t understand. Now I think I always knew a little bit, how small my world was in such a bigger one.

But I couldn’t of known, in third grade? Maybe because it was the start of endlessly loving people who would never love me. Maybe it was nothing. Maybe the headstones just looked pretty from far away. I don’t know.