Disillusion

When did my innocence die?

Was it stolen in a single, shattering moment? Did it vanish like a breath on glass, erased before I even knew to miss it? Or did it fade in slow motion, dissolving piece by piece like whispers lost to the wind.

So quiet, so gradual, that by the time I noticed the silence, it was already too late?

The world was gentle once. Or maybe I was simply too young to see its teeth.

Some people can point to the exact second their world changed. A crack of thunder that split the sky, a single breath before and a different one after. A wound so deep it rewrote everything. I was not given that mercy…

or cruelty. No clean break, no defining scar.

Just a slow erosion, the tide pulling away piece by piece until I turned around and found the shore abandoned, the ocean gone, and nothing left but the bleached bones of who I used to be.

You don’t notice the moment the magic fades. You only notice its absence, the way the air feels thinner, stories no longer feel true.

Was it the moment I learned that love and lies could share the same breath? That a promise wasn’t always an anchor, sometimes a thread spun too thin to hold? That even the ones who swore they’d stay could vanish without a sound, leaving behind only footprints, vanishing like ink in the rain?

Or was it later, when I became so good at silence, when I learned to turn pain into poetry and heartbreak into a cruel laugh? When I realized that some pain is meant to be swallowed whole, buried so deep that even I could pretend it wasn’t there? That survival, I this world, sometimes means becoming your own illusion, whole on the outside, unraveling beneath the skin?

The monsters in my childhood stories were always defeated by the final page. In the real world, they wear human faces and walk beside us.

Maybe innocence didn’t die in a single breath but in a thousand small surrenders. The first time I said I’m fine and meant the opposite. The first time I stood in a crowded room and felt utterly alone. The first time I looked at myself and didn’t recognize the person staring back.

And yet, was it ever meant to last? Was innocence something I was supposed to hold onto, or was it always meant to slip through my fingers like water, like sand, like time itself? Was I meant to stay soft? Or was I meant to be shaped by the breaking, carved by loss, reforged by fire?

Because here I stand.

Not untouched. Not unscarred. But alive.

Stronger, perhaps. Sharper. But not just hardened. Something else, something different. Sea glass, once jagged and wild, now shaped by the storm, by the waves, by the endless, merciless tide.

Would I take it back if I could? Gather every lost fragment, press them together like shattered porcelain, and return to the self I once was?

Or would I find that I no longer fit? That innocence is not what I miss, but something else.

Because sometimes, the day catches me off guard. In laughter that catches me off guard, in the smallest moments of wonder, I feel it again, not innocence, but something just as bright.

A different kind of magic. Not the fragile belief that the world is kind, but the unshakable wonder that even in a sky full of cruel, burning stars, they are suspended in something greater.

An endless, unseen vastness. We call it space, but it is the same as kindness. All around us, all-encompassing, too infinite to be noticed, too vast to ever be lost.

Maybe innocence was never something that died. Maybe it was stolen, pointed at, mocked, torn away by hands that had long since forgotten the weight of wonder. Or maybe we gave it up ourselves, burned too fast, too bright, so blinded by the fire that we mistook its glow for the whole sky.

We were told the stars were what mattered. The bright. The burning. The things we could see and name. So we chased them, worshiped them, let them sear themselves into our vision. Never once questioning the endless black that held them.

But we were wrong.

The stars were never the thing. They were only the distractions. The noise. The flickering embers trying to convince us they were fire.

The real truth was in the dark.

The vast. The silent. The infinite.

The spaces between.

That was where everything waited. Where everything had always been.

And no one, no one, could ever take it from us.

Because the unknown was never empty. It was never loss.

It was wonder. It was awe. It was infinity, stretching forever, patient, unshaken, untouched.

And now, at last, I remember.