The world of children is quite naturally different from the world of adults. And of course it is, because their brains and bodies and bright round faces and sturdy little hearts are still growing and stretching, like hand crafted taffy in some quaint little taffy shops that can still be found perched at the edge of some little beaches that haven't been turned into suburbs yet. Children, like adults, don't have time for deep introspection. But they do it anyway. In the world of children, it is always time for stopping to consider small things and the past that's been left behind, and so on and so forth. When a child goes through and on to adulthood there is sometimes a stage of heartbreak, if they discover that they can no longer make time for themselves to evaluate the little irrelevant bits of his life.
Teenagers, like children, have minds and bodies and faces and hearts that stretch like hand crafted taffy. But they have touched the adult world and have thus been changed in some ways that cannot be reversed. Sometimes, their sturdy little hearts grow bigger, and they stretch and stretch until one realises that the sturdy little heart isn't very sturdy anymore, and is instead quite delicate and breaks very easily. That is why many teenagers already mimic the brokenhearted bachelors locked up all alone in their apartments: because teenagers are often just brokenhearted children.
Sometimes, a child grows to be an adult without being crushed mercilessly by the world, instead, and ends up being able to frolic through their adult life, whether ordinary or extraordinary or a little bit of both, with extra space for themselves for thinking. Those people are very rare in some places, but always identifiable, because they have enough dreams to light up an entire world.
He was far from a child or a teenager, anyhow, so those kind of people weren't relevant to him, or this story, which is to say, the story of Mark. Other things that were irrelevant to him were his father, the taking of weekend excursions, vacations, homemade food, and his grandmother. And he let himself think about those things sometimes, and dwell on them, but not for too long, lest he start feeling like a child again, or worse, a teenager. That's why it was strange for him to find himself staying up still thinking about the potato bug on his crocus that had reminded him of his grandmother, and his grandmother who had reminded him of his childhood and his father that he had left behind and accidentally, or perhaps not accidentally, cut ties with. He didn't really recall his father's face.
