It’s very very very difficult for me to accept the slow (yet quickened) death of innocence and its self-perpetuating nature.
Hurt people hurt people, and the impossibility of ending that cycle defeats me.
There’s nothing as hurtful as realizing that a little boy playing on a jungle-gym with the biggest smile you’ve ever seen has a father who beats him every day, and that he in turn will beat people back. Nothing as shattering as knowing that young girls everywhere are continually losing their innocence to old men they trust who tell them that this is just their little secret. Nothing worse than the notion of a teenage boy being ostracized and abandoned by his God-fearing family because he likes the thought of boys kissing boys. Nothing as injurious as the idea of a young girl casually eating breakfast at the family table between her still-drunken father and her still-bruised mother after a night in which the sounds of her father’s fist-sent lecturers were particularly louder than normal. And nothing as soul-crushing as the image of that young girl, in the midst of holding up her pillow to her ears, convincing herself that if her beautiful, wonderful, and smart mother deserves this kind of love, this little of love, that she, not being as good or as pretty or as smart, can’t possibly deserve anything better when she grows up.
But maybe it’s more difficult accepting that in the scheme of things all that slow (yet quickened) torture means nothing. I don’t know, I have a hard time with that too.