Innocence, as I have come to understand it, maybe the single most figment of being we are all capable of possessing. It either reflects as shine in your eyes (whether temporarily or permanently is only a sign of the times), or you have lost it. Full stop. Considering the former scenario of innocence by means of wishing an alternative and closing your eyes shut so tightly your lashes bend, signifying perhaps a bowing to what it is you hope to come true. Similarly to wishing on stars or on birthday candles as long as they extinguish in a singular breath or on dandelions, in the same fashion. Eventually, a breath of acknowledgment to the former happens and you come to realize the hearsay and lack of so-called magic in the willingness of doing these things, in the willingness of thinking there could be a different outcome.
This idea festers within me like a portion of food I've become used to. Though not bad tasting it eventually loses its zest, its spice, the excitement for the next bite. Then the craving comes around again. My craving does not come in a sense of desire to feel it but rather desire to reminisce upon it. Often no rhyme or reason, it comes to me in uncertain moments. The wind changes directions, I smell a laundry detergent, humidity sits on my skin like another shirt as darkness in the evening settles, and there it comes. This recollection only seems to wash over me in conjunction with a wave of grief, a sense of longing, the camera focusing on what has now become lost. It is sure to threaten tears, only one of few actions to do so. It tends to come retrospectively as if I still have something left to learn.
I come to you with this bearing of innocence in the wake of losing my second pet in less than a year, a nature that seems so naïve, so childish, innocence is the only answer. On a trip to New York City in the dead of winter I found myself reading a piece of work on grief, an analysis simply for understanding. Joan Didion wrote, after the loss of her husband, "I could not give away the rest of his shoes. I stood there for a moment, then realized why: he would need shoes if he was to return. The recognition of this thought by no means eradicated the thought." I had not considered this as my own thinking until we buried our first dog. The dog who had moved with us, the dog who had watched me go from school to school as I advanced. I seemed to believe I had to have been 8 or 9 when we adopted him, though I cannot seem to recall if the year on the photo I am thinking of says '01 or '03, suggesting I would be 6 at the least. His favorite blanket came to cover him as we laid him to rest under a tree in our backyard. I thought, as the gray clouds threatened the sky and thunder began to boom, "he'll need this or he'll get cold in the rain." Not for a minute stopping to think he would no longer have a need to feel warm or cold or love or the pavement under his feet on walks with me. Similarly, I begrudgingly arranged for our second deceased dog's items to be given away in the same fashion. Four and a half bags of dry dog food, 4 or 5 cans of wet dog food, toys, treats, brushes and shampoo, old water bowls we no longer used that stayed for years in the cupboard with the lightbulbs. As my mom was so intent on giving these items away I wondered why, in lieu of sitting with her grief and processing it to understand it more, she found solace in giving away the remaining things of what once was more home for her than her own bed. Why she immediately cleaned the nose prints off the windows or went after the corners of the hardwood floor with the vacuum. Not at all considering that this may be a reflection of her own loss of innocence or any semblance of it.
My inclination on if we had put Brin down too early never strayed. His head still smelled exactly the same as it had when we adopted him, his ears were just as soft. I recalled this moment of bringing him home as I kissed the top of his head one last time and through tears and a black cloth mask whispered "I want to bottle this smell." My grief continues to trick me into thinking I witnessed an innate fear in his eyes, rather than understanding that we all knew he was miserable and it was the adrenaline talking. My innocence shone through my maternal instinct, grabbing his stuffed monkey I gifted him when Acorah passed and pondering whether I should take the damp towel I used for my hair or the soft blanket material he had curled up on the night before during a storm. That was before we knew the diagnosis of a rapidly developing cancer, and whatever else pre-existed, whatever the vet did not tell us. It seems naïve and quite embarrassing to find some of the most vivid grief in the loss of a pet, but I do not think I have ever felt my heart break as much as it has the past year. As I came to cry in the corner of the vet's office I recognized how much I had not received this allowance 11 months before. I hadn't been able to cry, I was not allowed to. I was the one asking questions, I went back to work and was expected to turn on a façade, I mumbled through frustration that I had just put my dog down and was immediately told I was being interviewed for a manager position the next day. The difference in this time versus the latter was others recognizing their own naivety and at what cost it comes, or doesn't come, to them.
There is a sweet little boy I have come to know through a family friend who is all that innocence encompasses. He both is and has the glimmer I associate with innocence, similar to sequined glitter or the sunlight reflecting off of water. Nick, making figure 8's with his head and swearing the sugar from his sno-cone was going to make him fly around the room. Sat on the hood of a Chevy exclaiming he was as tall as a mountain, he knew no difference despite his unbelievable intelligence for only being two years old at the time. Nick, who, when I spoke of my dad, mistook my mention as us talking about his father, who had recently passed.
"He's with Jesus."
The car sat quietly. We asked in unison, "what?"
"He's with Jesus" he chimed again from the back seat. The information had to process. Our misunderstanding had to take us to a place we hadn't even considered would be a topic of conversation in his presence. We acknowledged his statement, his understanding, and let him decide whether to lead the conversation or not. Eventually, I understood that in the silence, in the absence of sense, in the routine of speaking to him like a human being and not baby-talking around him, is where our misinterpretation of his formative emotional developments came into play. Nick was exhibiting the behavior we all once had, some still do, before the divisive nature of day to day politics raptured the throat of what we ever considered to be home, whether literally or metaphorically.
It is not the question of his belief that asks the question or is the reconsideration of innocence. It is not the analysis of what he has been taught to this point that determines whether or not his innocence is pure or based on a lack of experience. In a child, no such analysis should exist unless it is an examination of what the examiner has lost. There are moments with Nick that I have come to hold dear, those moments that make me feel I am closer to my own pixie dust than I have ever been. Whilst finding rocks to throw in the creek, Nick told me I was invited to Walt Disney World the next time he went. The first time I met him he held my hand as we ran through a train depot, calling my name with a southern drawl that would make Dolly Parton question what he had said. It is not his actions that reflect this innocence like a mirror, nor is it just his lack of "bad exposure" he's had to the world around him. He has been encouraged to ask questions, to observe, to go about exploring the world in an unadulterated kind of way. He had no shame in speaking up about his dad because he did not recognize who I was talking about, he just knew he had something to offer and went about it willingly. These are where the lines of innocence and vulnerability seem to cross.
In her Netflix special, author Brene Brown says "when we lose our capacity for vulnerability, joy becomes foreboding. It becomes scary." In a certain way, I assume we cannot have one without the other. So poses the question, is it our lack of corruption that makes us brave enough to be vulnerable, or is it our capacity to be vulnerable that allows innocence to placed on a pedestal? Either way, there is an absence of one action to obtain the other and I suppose it is dealer's choice on how each one is interchangeable. As we grow, there is a tendency to allow both actions to become back-burner issues, if not become missing altogether. Though at some point or another in our collective and individual growth we have all been taught to suit up in our armor, this particular encouragement is found in boys and young men. I have watched generations of men exhibit a refusal to show emotion, expressing aforementioned emotion in outlets like anger, physical and verbal violence, self-harm by way of substance or alcohol abuse, anything to numb the pain they are "not allowed to talk about," because it had been believed and taught for so long that emotion was not something you showed because it made you seem weak. When dealing with traumatic experiences, this fear of not showing emotion because it equates weakness surpasses any and all gender norms. Vulnerability knows no gender, it only responds to the conditioning based on gender. Nevertheless, whether trauma has been experienced or not, there is an innate fear that the moment we start to give in to our vulnerability a number of things could, can, and/or will happen. The fear of being misconstrued as weak, the inclination that the moment we begin to see our world for what it is in its purest form we will receive answers for questions we did not want to ask, alternatively we will move to a place of fear, waiting for something else to go bad because "that's just my luck." We begin to spiral.
Belief in luck brings forth the idea that you believe in more than what is in front of you. This is what I understand as a facet of innocence. To hope for an alternative solution. The acceptance of something for what it is translates as a loss of possibility for greener grass. We come to learn this in the hardening of our shells, in the building of our metaphorical armor, in the nature of being raised in a way that keeps our parents from seeming like they are incompetent, the natural breaking down of the original psyche for fabricated things that are supposed to seem more important than our own inner stability and reassurance. Though perhaps a faulty indication that someone's purest form is not missing, with excitement in things like luck, magic, and the powers of the universe it brings to me a sense of peace and encouragement. I have found myself spending time dwelling on the impending doom of adulthood, recognizing the adults I see not experiencing or believing much of the extraordinary, I have come to fear I have lost my own. One could consider the looking-glass theory as an example of this chill down my spine, but it is more present as what seems like a contagion. Either way, this fear comes from seeing the lack of things that seem "childish," unless only to "get by" or to appease the offspring someone has created since losing their own child-like wonder.
Faking it until we make it only goes so far in this scenario. Again I reiterate that I firmly believe you either have it or you have lost it and there is no gray area. Only once this purity, so to speak, is gone do we realize the inescapable death of what seemingly kept us young. You are the judge or the judged. My question. Are we able to regain this sense of innocence upon arriving in the present moment of its loss, or is it buried under the oak tree with our family pets forever? And in the words of Joan Didion, once again, do we "let them go, let them be dead" or do we accept what we no longer have and accommodate to letting a new characteristic fill this space in our beings that is void of wonderment?
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