The Child

The tiles on the floor of my room usually look perfectly flat, but upon close inspection, or by the chance glint of light off a scratch-like ravine on the surface, you notice that it’s not quite as smooth as it initially appears to be.

There’s so much texture to the world to be appreciated if we just stop and look. I’ve missed the texture in so many people — gotten just a passing impression of them. It begs the question of how few others actually even know me.

I wonder if mother and father know me. They care for me and feed me, so they must know me. Why else would they do it? It’s true that our communication is sparse. But they took me in at such a young age I can hardly remember it now. I do my best to make them proud, but they’ve sacrificed so much for me, to have reared me and provided for me all this time. It’s hardly something I can ever repay in full.

These quiet mornings always leave me pensive. I don’t love work, but there’s something even more dissatisfying in these idle times. It’s tranquil, and thought-provoking, but the restless energy — the craving for actualization — it makes me feel useless.

Well, it should only be a few more moments now before mother or father come to open the door to my room, and I can get started on my day.

2

Out in the fields, I feel alive, but with it I also feel discomfort. The sun is burning on my back. I can feel the heat accumulate on my skin until a breeze comes to wash it off. The sweat has saturated my clothes, and where there is no clothes, it rolls down my arms and forehead. My hands grow raw as I work the shovel, and every time it meets the resistance of the ground the impact reverberates through my body. After all these hours, it leaves my limbs shaky.

The sun is bright, and it forces me to squint, contorting my face into a perpetual grimace. Still, here life is simple. I do this task. I repay what I owe. I have a purpose and a use and a sense of self.

I’m harder working than mom and dad’s other children. I love them so much that I’d really hate to fall behind and do less than the others. However, sometimes I feel lazy. Yet, all it takes is a reproachful grunt from father to get me back working myself to my limit.

3

The work day is done again. I much prefer the idle time in the evening. I’ve already given over my energy to my work. It is easy to enjoy some meaningless diversion now. And I’m so glad to receive my daily dinner. It’s absolutely delicious.

I also appreciate that father shared a piece of his dinner with me. There’s nothing like a bit of food from mother or father’s plate. We eat over in the children’s area, but sometimes I go over to mother and father’s table to see if I can get a bit more. I was taught not to ask for it, but they’re kind and, seeing my patience, they regularly reward that small act of obedience.

After dinner, I return to my room. I have mixed feelings about being in there. I enjoy the sense of security. It’s calm, peaceful, and safe to be enclosed like that. However, sometimes I feel a sinister want to leave that space. I suppose that’s the balancing act between freedom and security.

4

And just like that it’s morning again. This morning I find myself wondering where it started, and how we got here. Obviously, us children are not mother and father’s biological children. We look nothing like them. We were adopted out of the goodness of their heart. Remembering that thought always fills me with a sense of inner warmth, and it brings a reassured smile to my face.

Still, I wonder what lies outside the boundaries of my memory and the boundaries of this place. Who were my actual parents? Is there any particular reason that I, and the rest of mom and dad’s children, ended up here?

It’s no good to dwell on these things too much, but one can’t help but feel a passing curiosity. The important thing is that I’m cared for. I was taught essential values, like to be helpful around the farm, to be respectful of mother and father, to be grateful for all I’ve been given, and to take care of myself.

Mother and father insist that we eat even when we’re not hungry. It’s important to them that we stay strong and healthy. They encourage us to do the work that keeps us mentally and physically sturdy. It’s a good life after all. I remain curious, but ultimately, I’m contented. I’m lucky to be here.

5

The usual peace I feel as I mechanically raise and lower the spade is being somewhat tainted today. Thankfully, the repetitive work interrupts the full bloom of the thoughts and feelings that are bothering me. Each jolt to my frame from the shovel resets the internal process.

Yet, it lingers on in the shadows. Like a weed in the cracks of the pavement, it continues to strive towards the light of my conscious awareness. In fact, I’ve felt it there for some time now — maybe even for years. It’s hard to know I’ll have to leave this place someday.

After work, there’s nowhere to hide from it: I used to think that we were taken from the farm at a certain age, but then one of my brothers was gone quite young. He was much bigger than everyone else, and I wondered if it wasn’t our ages — not the approach to adulthood as I once thought — but our physical sizes that decided when we moved on from here.

I wish I could ask mother and father, but I live in fear of those disapproving grunts. I’ve learned that in life our usual response to an unknown is one of fear and anxiety, but we have to trust the process. After all, I couldn’t have possibly known what life on the farm would entail for me, but it’s a blessing from top to bottom.

Whatever is planned for me next, I’m sure it’ll be just as good — no, even better, as that’s how life unfolds.

6

Lately I’ve begun to feel like life never ends. Weeds like this keep springing up in my mind. I find it harder and harder to live in any one day, and I instead feel how each day is a microcosm in a larger picture of monotony.

My work is still pleasantly distracting, but I need something more. In the back of my mind, these questions and realizations are always there. They’re building on me more and more in the form of an inescapable tension. I try to release it through physical exertion. I push myself until I’m completely out of breath. I use the pain in my arms as a way to blot it out. I feel this ever-present need to escape.

In the nights and in the mornings, it reaches its peak. It’s not only the lack of anything to home my attention on. But my room has begun to elicit quite a different emotion from me as of late. I used to find the cold, immovable bars soothing. They made this space my own and protected me from everything else in the world.

However, the uprising in my mind has begun to manifest as an uprising from me. I sometimes feel the need to leave my room. I want desperately to escape after mother and father have locked me in for the night. In my more impulsive moments, I’ve actually tried to squeeze my way out. I’ve tried to see if there’s any chance I can open the lock for myself. I quickly regret these actions; I know I shouldn’t be trying to open it, but I can’t help it.

At other times, the whole situation becomes so overwhelming that I think I’m left with only the option to try to break down the walls of the room — and if I don’t, the walls of my mind would breakdown instead. It takes me through permutations of mental anguish. The impotent rage quickly gives way to a sharp and harrowing fear that I will never be able to escape this cycle, and the full resignation to my powerlessness results in me experiencing bouts of the deepest sadness I’ve ever known.

I sometimes find myself sobbing uncontrollably, but I try to quiet myself if I see mother or father approaching, so as not to bother them. Still, even in their subtle glances, I detect some accusation of guiltiness and thoughts of disapproval. They’ve done nothing to indicate it, but I can tell they’re disappointed in me. I’m a bad child.

And worse yet, I grow larger every day. If I’m forced to leave today, will my time here be remembered as a failure?

7

I want nothing more than to do my work well. But the shame and fear I feel that I have not done it well, or cannot continue to do it well, distract me from the work itself and sap me of my energy. I am being run ragged from within; I have nothing left to give to the work.

Occasionally, I recognize that I have done good work. And the reward from father’s plate, and the snort of approval he gives me, seem like undeniable acknowledgement of this. It makes me feel better for a time. But I find that I have a harder and harder time believing the signs of my good work, while the signs of failure and rejection grow ever stronger.

I wish I just had someone to talk to about this. Yet, to be a failure is to be a failure in the eyes of others — this is where it becomes most unfortunate. I must smile. I must maintain the appearance. For all of these feelings of inner turmoil and hollowness, if I can just maintain this pretty image, then nothing bad will have come of it.

To work now is just that. I must keep up the appearance. It has not actually all come to naught unless I let them know. Until then, my shame is just my own. It’s just a feeling. It’s not nice to experience, but it’s just my own nightmare. In the eyes of the world, I can still be whatever I need to be.

8

It’s dinner time again. I sometimes feel like I’m living just for this bowl of crunchy delicacies. I can’t imagine what extreme pleasure mother and father must feel as they eat their meals every day — each of them so different, not changing only day-to-day, but having even a variety of foods within a single meal. I am ecstatic just to receive my portion of kibble and whatever falls from their plate. I’m truly happy at meal time.

But this small escape comes to an end far too quickly. My thoughts on leaving the farm have begun to turn. I know that I should be grateful to be here. I know that the problem lies within me for being unable to find happiness despite being in this place where things are stable, safe, and I’m well cared for. Yet, I believe I need a change regardless.

I’m still nervous about what awaits me, and I hate the idea of being away from mother and father. Nonetheless, it is clear I am maladapted to life on the farm. It’s clear some of us have a dysfunction so that we can’t be happy, not even in a life with all that one could ever want. I crave the coming change deep within my bones.

I continue to see as my brothers and sisters, who are around my size and just slightly older, stop showing up for work. Where have they gone, and when will I get to go?

9

The restlessness is almost painful this morning. I am dying inside waiting for the door to my room to be opened, but I need even more than that. I need to escape this larger room — this place, and this routine. I need to quiet or resolve this tension in my soul, and the endless repetition is no longer a sufficient distraction. It has sunk into the background, while my mental woes assume the forefront of my mind.

I need to escape. I need to escape. I need to escape. There’s no way I can keep at this life. If I can’t find something more, I need much, much less. I need to shut it down. I need to escape.

Oh blessed luck, there’s the turn of the lock. It’s given me a flush of relief I could’ve never anticipated. Just like that the sound has pulled me back from the brink, at least for the moment, and I can breathe freely again. Maybe I can make it through the day. Please, please, just let me get to my work now.

Wait, we’re not going to the field. To where then? This is a new corridor. Is this the place? Has the day finally come when I get to leave the farm?! Oh, what a silly and petulant child I have been, reveling in my sorrows, while here, right when I need it most, I’m finally being taken to my salvation.

Isn’t this how things always are? We fret and fret, and for what? In the end, the wisdom of life is that it always brings us to exactly where we need to be. I’m so happy right now I could cry, and the only dark patch on that brightness is the recognition that I have been such a spoiled brat about things. I should know better than to be so impatient, so self-involved.

10

This new room is strange. It immediately impresses upon the senses a feeling of sterility. It reminds one of the chef’s kitchen or the surgeon’s room where, despite general surroundings of complete cleanliness, there is that one spot where the work is being done — where the surgery is ongoing or the food is being prepared, and that one part is active and messy to such a high degree that it creates the most startling juxtaposition with the rest of the setting.

In this place, I set eyes upon that spot of activity with horror. There was blood and so much of it. And there was father, covered in blood himself, and wielding a sharp-edged instrument. I feel as if I’ve just been ejected from my body by the most paralyzing terror. There’s nothing left of me but a frantically beating heart and a consciousness that belongs entirely to this scene. My internal dialogue is nothing but an echoing scream telling me to escape.

Then, I looked in father’s face, and what I saw broke me from that uncontrollable sense of dread. In fact, it confused me, dazed me even. He did not look murderous or angry, as I expected he would under these circumstances. He did not look concerned or sympathetic, as I hoped he would under these circumstances. He looked completely unbothered, bored even.

Whatever violent action he was engaged in here was one he had done so many times — innumerable times — that he conducted it with the same level of thought and feeling that one might have when they wash a dish or brush their teeth. Seeing him in this state was almost hypnotizing. It made me feel that not only was he a machine, but that fate itself is a machine, and that it had been guaranteed from the moment of my birth that I would someday end up here.

I’ve gone to run, as the flower of hope was still sprouting somewhere within, but it was only a tiny fraction of my being that was devoted to my escape — the rest of me had resigned itself the moment I saw how banal all that’s about to happen is to father. Still, I’ve managed half-heartedly to turn and begin to flee.

Father’s massive hand reached around my torso and that was that.