Bleary, sleep-deprived eyes devoured the world that stirred ahead of them, exploding with color, ravishingly revolving in harmonious sounds.

From a young age, the child was in love with the enticing scenery, embracing the endearing hug of life. It trusted the giants towering above it, guiding the path. As miniature feet stumbled through rooms—learning to balance—the child was growing.

Words spilled from the child’s mouth as wires fused in its brain; pieces of life were falling into precise places, assembling a designated house to reside in.

When the child could stand on two feet, radiating fiery pride, burning red hot, it ran. After the colors, after the people, after all the blurry scenes it had attempted to put together, the child ran. Feet, not as small as before, revolted against the hard ground as they leaped, running and running after life.

With lungs beating, fighting for the air during the tumultuous run, the child ran full force into anything before it. Youthful innocence coated the world in a drunken joy, blurring the lines between the feasible and inconceivable.

As lines daringly disintegrated—opening the world up like a feast for the child—every path laid out on the towering, tantalizing table, dancing underneath the golden light that obliterated shadows in an agonizingly angelic way.

No darkness shaded or jaded the contours of the child’s life; opportunities that it had been running for, laboring its innovative mind over, ripened under the resplendent nourishment which enticed the industrious child.

But years stealthily snuck onto the calendars, regretfully exhibiting a change in the maturing world. The child’s height traveled up the door frame like an ever-evolving skyscraper as the youthful innocence vacated its still sleep-deprived eyes with age. Day in and day out, the child deliberately snubbed the swaps of life, almost as if it knew the effect life would wreak upon the table.

But alas, the child—barely a kid still—could not survive under ignorant bliss.

Now, the child runs with calloused, cold feet, no longer inspired by fiery passion, once beguiling colors and attractions of life dull with the loss of juvenile motivation. No longer hospitably hugged by the curtains of childhood, the child is left to face heart-breaking actuality.

Behind these curtains, the child dares to peer—to inspect—at the remains. Laying beyond the disguising drapes, the table resides, still placed there from the child’s formative years.

However, the light still glistening above no longer sings a golden tune across the room; trails once highlighted by rays above are no longer accentuated. Shadows cement over the pathways of life as the light has turned into a grey, decrepit glow.

Lines—lines not once there—have made themselves known, enforcing the shadows, the barriers, the blockades on the table. And the child now sees them.

The child, now much older, feverishly scrutinizes those lines derived during its growth. Mimicking a ghost, had they always been there? Possibilities once in the child’s capabilities vanish in the shadows, and the youthful curiosity has returned for just a moment more.

Enraptured by wonder, the child questions if those paths of life will ever recover under the suffocating shadows. With no hope, no wonder left, only worn, accepted trails across the table’s opportunities remain.

Yearnfully, the child questions if that golden, glimmering light will sing again. For if it doesn’t, who will the child become?