Innocence seems to be a weapon these days.  I look at the little ones with sparkly dresses and action figures and wonder what it must feel like to have daddies who buy them cookies with frosting on a Sunday.  Not even on their birthdays, just on a Sunday. I wonder what it might feel like to have the most exciting thing in their week be losing a tooth or learning to ride a bike without training wheels, getting invited to a friend’s birthday party at the coolest trampoline park with the sweetest cake you ever did taste and the best party favors ever.  

Ignorance is bliss.  It grows to be a sparkly and glittery mess inside yourself that no one ever knows how to clean up, so instead, over the years it pours out your mouth, out your green eyes until someone, anyone, starts to hear and see you in your pink sparkly dress.  And they finally start telling you the secrets of this world. You try to hang on to the sparkles and the glitter that slip away, somehow catapulting into the wind, attaching to trees and leaves, branches and streets. No one can stop the glitter once it leaves.  

Innocence leaves you alone but knowledge leaves you lonely.

Scrape, scrape goes your heart on a pavement you wish you never found.  In some red dress and black heels you wonder who purchased. How you managed to climb out of that pink sparkly dress you always danced in, to scrape on a road no one is on.  Abandoned to your situation. Speckles of glitter line your walk, cling to the scratchy fabric of your dress, let us stay, they beg.  

A welcome mat.  A tear-stained face.  A glass of lemonade. Welcome to my heart, it sucks in here, but you’re welcome all the same.