The Innocents

Chapter Two

There weren't any catastrophic wars, viral epidemics and much to many people's dismay, no zombie outbreak.

We just did to ourselves what humans are commonly known to do and that's destroying their very own spiritual self. Morals went by the wayside. The immense sensitivity to trivial matters grew and grew we still found ourselves victims. The real ones fell into nothingness. We were a selfish, cracked, broken people and that is the world I lived in.

There are so many things that I remember that I am ashamed of. They weren't dire things like breaking the law, but more nonsensical thoughts of someone who didn't know jack shit about the world. I never watched the news because, to me, the real world wasn't real. I'd much rather dwell in my books where it was far more exciting. I knew that I lived in a different time because of history class. You know how it is. You accept matters as they are because that it the Normal. It had been like that since you had been alive so that was all you knew.

I won't go into eighteen years of my life and bore you with unnecessary details. Besides, you really don't have very many pinnacle moments at a young age. At least not that you commemorate with being life changing. I can count on one hand the number of important memories before the age of ten that seemed to steer my life on the path that it was on now.

One being my mother and her depression and the way she would stay in her room for days at a time. At that age you thought it was just what mothers did. You accepted it when your father told you that she was busy making something for me and he'd come home with something store bought saying it was from her and steadily convincing me that my mother was some sort of Santa Claus. It wasn't until I saw my father holding her while she cried that I realized that, just like Santa Claus, the lies your parents tell you to shield you from the truth was not done for your benefit, but for theirs as well.

I decided never to lie.

Second being when I finally knew what my mother was going through, I did everything in my power to cure her of it. I'd do the housework and homework without being asked. I'd even help my dad cook dinner on the nights she was holed up in her bedroom. I think all of that tired me out because most of it stopped by the time I hit high school. She got better so I decided to start living.

The king of England died when I was eleven years old and I had watched the televised funeral with my parents and the rest of the planet. I remember thinking how overdone and wasteful such an event was. Dead is dead. They don't care whether they're lying a solid gold casket or given a eulogy by some famous musician who had been so close to the king that he could tell you what his farts smelled like.

I remember thinking that exact thing. It's funny what you remember as a child.

"Funerals are for the living," Dad said to me. "It's to help in the grieving process."

The grieving process. Yes. Here we go.

Denial. He's not dead. He couldn't be dead. How could he be dead?

Anger. He died. Why would God let him die? He is a cruel God. I don't believe in God any longer!

Depression. God must have taken him because I had done something wrong. I am a lost cause. I should have been the one to go.

Acceptance. Making a cup of coffee and sitting on the back-porch smoking a cigarette.

Still, I thought funerals were pointless, but I never knew anyone that had died. I never knew what the living needed to keep on living.