There are adults that have never experienced heartbreak and are children on the inside, and occasionally they feel an odd sort of feeling within themselves. It's very primitive and very simple, a sort of urge to live freely. Children that never grow up have a kind of spirit within them that knows, with a kind of gut instinct and on a very basic level, who they are. There is an identity, a sense of self, flowing through each and every child. And sometimes, children can grow into adults, and experience that bitter heartbreak, and yet there is a kind of childlike core in them. Today, more and more adults grow up and retain that inner child, which gives us the look of wonder on our faces when we greet our loved ones, and the laughter that we have at jokes that are rarely funny, and most importantly our sense of self. Teenagers, who often are toeing the line between child and adult, can feel this struggle between the bitterness of becoming an adult and the child inside them fighting back. This is why they become moody and pensive very often. This is also why it's important for them to have friends. True friends, who become the loved ones that we greet with a look of wonder on our faces, the people who tell us the rarely funny jokes for us to laugh at, and the ones who, through their every interaction with us, redeem over and over that inner sense of self that is so important to nurture in the soul of every adult.
Mark had no friends, or at least not any friends that he allowed to get too close to him. And any child that was left inside of him had been locked away in his chest for years and years, along with the memories of his past, and the purple crocus flowers, and all the small things he liked to entertain himself by contemplating. All of it was locked in a box, and it was kept tucked away on his organised little shelf of a brain, and catalogued neatly under a label that said something like "things that aren't worth thinking about for too long" or perhaps something a bit shorter. He was a good, reliable, honest, logical, and very organised accountant, and he did everything that way.
This morning, he had cracked open this inner mental box of "unspeakables" and "irrelevant"s and "unnecessary hassle"s to take a little peek at his grandmother. Everything else, like the father, and the drinking of said father, and the homemade food, had all come flooding out like vehement spirits flying out of the Box of Pandora herself. And all because the lid of aforementioned mental box had been jammed open by the purple crocus he had planted carefully years and years ago hoping to forget about everything that was originally in that very mental box. The irony of this was not lost on him.
