One-Hundred Days

I am not young enough to know everything.
You quoted the famous author without shame and went on.
We grow up away from the ground that kept us safe during childhood and lose our knowledge of the small things that mean the most. We lose our ability to remember faces and why we love the people we do. We lose our ability to sift through everything we don't need and instead focus on everything that hurts us, and we become so foolish that we believe it's everything we need. We believe that what hurts us is good for us, but when we were young, we knew to turn away from the things that caused us pain. That's why we never had broken hearts or mental breakdowns. We got hurt, realized what hurt us, and turned away from it. For some reason, when we grow away from our childhood, we lose that knowledge and understanding and ability to walk away. That's why now, we stay with the ones who hurt us, and keep going back to the vices that slowly kill us, we don't know any better.

I walked away then, tired of your words that made me seem worthless in comparison. In my childhood, I was smarter than most would expect. I had to come to grips with things earlier than most may have understood. When I was young, I was cut up and beat up and bruised. When I was young, I had new bruises with every day, new scrapes, new wounds, and I was the dirtiest I’d ever been, but I was the most innocent. In my childhood I saw things no one should see, but didn’t understand them, and the things I went through were things no one should never have to experience, but I couldn’t grasp their important relativity to how I would live in the future until the future came.
When I was young, people stared. They stared at my cuts and bruises and dirtiness. They stared at the young, stick of a human being with all of these wounds and the never failing smile. I was imperfect and mature from an early age. I understood things other people my age had never even knew existed. When I was young, I smiled with my scrapes and bruises, while the people stared and I kept my secret knowledge in the backs of my mind.

I had never realized that things I saw until I was older, but I always knew them, I knew what people would think if I told any and so I kept them safe. I've been keeping those secrets and events safe since then, but never near my heart, only in the back blank spaces of my mind where they settle into darkness that was nonexistent in my childhood. I had light in my mind, never covered by loneliness or memories of things I can't control or understand. I have never understood how or why the things I experienced in my childhood happened, all I know is that they have and they have effected me in a way I could have never imagined at the time they were falling into place. I never understood them until people told me it was bad, that I should never let people touch me in that way. I never understood until I was told, and the person who told me meant no harm, they didn't understand just as I hadn't. They thought they were telling me things that had never happened, they were telling me as a precaution, but it was already too late.

I never understood these things in my childhood, and I'm thankful for it, because in my childhood I was cut up and beat up and bruised, with more understanding than was for my own good but too late, but my God, when I was young, I could never stop smiling, no matter what was thrown onto my skin.