The Innocents
“This is your insanity, this is your death.” Those are the words spoken to me, in a slight French lilt, and the words seemed float in the still air, framed in false halos made of those dazzling lights.
My insanity was her rage, was her grief. That women cursed to never be believed. (We know now that she was insane, but what were those dastardly thoughts screaming, drifting around in her head?)
What was her fate, cursed to die so far from the glory she had once known? Was it to die at the hands of that red soldier, to die too young? Was she always destined to be another Iphigenia, a girls sacrifice in the man’s violent game of war?
My death is her death. My death is her sacrifice and my death is her vengeance. What would one do if their love struck them down? If their dresses were sewed with diamonds, and yet somehow the first shots were always the last? Was she too old to be innocent? Is seventeen no longer a child but a woman? And is it still not enough to kill them all too?
We dance under the lights, dreaming of fancy ballrooms a December away, another year gone, faded into dust. Gone into dust, like the dreams on innocence we used to hold so dear.
I dance for the children to tell their stories, to tell the world of their lost innocence, of their lost youth. I write and I dance and I scream for the babies thrown from the walls, but it will never be enough. Not until there are no children starving, no children working two jobs and going to high school to support their parents, not until there is no more children being killed in wars fought between men on the battlefield rather than the diplomats table. It will never be enough, not until children can see a doctor without having to sell their souls, it will never be enough until teens and children get the support they deserve, to not push themselves to the brink. It will not be enough until we can go to school and the morbid school shooting jokes are just jokes and not an escape from our echoing reality, and from our own knowledge of our fleeting mortality.
To save the world we must begin with the innocents, and they will pay us back in turn. We must be their insanity, we must know their pain, and one day we must know their death. To save the world we must begin with the ones who will save us, who will be better. Our legacy is planting a seed in a garden we will never see. Maybe one day it will be enough. But for now it won’t be enough.
It will never be enough. Not until there is our innocence again.
