The Remains of Childhood

Childhood did not leave me whole; it left behind remains. Not memories in the gentle sense, not stories that can be told without trembling, but fragments—dense, silent, unfinished. What survived childhood was not its laughter or its promises, but its weight, its residue, the parts that had nowhere to go when the rest learned how to move forward. Childhood ended, yes, but it did not disappear; it collapsed inward, shedding pieces of itself into matter, into objects, into surfaces that still carry its pressure. These are not relics of innocence but of endurance, not symbols of what was pure but of what stayed when purity was no longer possible. Time did not heal childhood; it pressed down on it, slowly, until softness learned how to harden and warmth learned how to remain without comfort. The remains of childhood do not speak in sentences; they speak in texture, in cracks, in the dull sheen of something handled too many times and then abandoned. Names were the first to go—names always leave early—and what stayed was the body’s memory, storing impact without explanation, holding loss without asking to be understood. What comes after childhood is not maturity or clarity, but aftermath: the quiet persistence of what the child could not carry across the threshold. These remains do not ask for rescue, nor do they accuse; they simply insist on being present, heavy with a time that never resolved itself. Childhood continues here, but altered, stripped of motion, reduced to form—neither alive in the way it once was nor gone in any final sense. It exists as remainder, as evidence, as something the ground refused to release. And I stand among these remains, aware that growing up did not mean leaving childhood behind, only surviving long enough to recognize what it became once it could no longer protect itself, once it learned how to stay as matter, as silence, as the unhurried proof that something fragile was here and did not entirely make it through.