Growing

ecphrasis, couldn't find the original image unfortunately

. When we were young, we pieced our world together any way we wanted; in our minds, it always fit together. Our flighty imaginations never rested long on a given aspect, creating surreal sunspots and skewed perspectives apparent in our memories of those summer-stained fields. We constructed the good and the bad, the distinction meaning nothing then. We ground the sandman's left-over dust into both playgrounds and skeletons to hide in the closets. We built treehouses and wrecked them without lifting a finger. There was no cloud that couldn't become a staircase, no pond that didn't hide a trapdoor or passage beneath its surface.
. But we can't find them now. The pieces of our beautiful puzzle have been scattered on the wind; our dazzling brainchild has been deconstructed into a bleak reality that breaks no laws of physics or perspective. We have returned to the sun-ripened fields and found nothing but dirt and decaying planks. We have waded through the ponds and struck only mud. We can no longer walk on the air as we remembered. We have seen the rusted hinges strewn among the root systems and realized that we married the skeletons we used to fear. We are wrapped in concrete and iron instead of hope and magic. We don't see secret passages anymore; we take pills for that now. Our hands are creased; our confidence is gone. Our adventures ended with the tunnels we thought would lead us to that pinprick of distant light we knew even then to be our dreams.