I love the smell of turpentine in the morning, my lunches were always insulated in laboratory film bags, and the lithography of an aristocratic dwarf still frequents my dreams. Raised by an artist, these were the stipulations of a proper childhood.

Just a miniature lonley thing, stowed behind a vast residential wall. What wasn’t vast in comparison to such a tiny thing? Subscribed only to an audio version, it was innate enough to realize everything existed outside that very wall. Tails and heads a bit perplexed, but it made just enough sense. But what was the everything? Surely there was more to it, more than just this resonance of inaudible sound.

A decade aforementioned, you left. Otherwise no subtext, what was I to know, blame or judge? Comprehension of the everything, or even the slightest of inclinations of what it was like for you, living and breathing on the other side of that wall. Not today nor tomorrow, but perhaps one day I will understand.

Fair child, undeveloped but yet masterful at surreal perception, intuition and thought. I could transpose this concept of everything into nullity, which equaled a slightly more unsophisticated idea of nothingness. It lacked color, temperature, and any other typical safe place characteristic. I remember it being white, cloudlike and unquestionably endless.

A preadolescence trick of thieves, returning absolution to the weary.