I miss being young.

I miss having no care in the world, except for what was going to be for dinner. My schedule was always the same: I went to school every day, found that it was hard to multiply the big numbers and remained scared of detention (I was a goody-two shoes.) The fact of the matter is that adulthood is full of a lot of truths. There are the small truths, like napping too long can mess up your whole day, and the huge truths, like the looming threat of death around every corner. Earthquakes can strike at any time, tornadoes can rip through cities in the blink of an eye and tsunamis can consume communities faster than a child with a bag of M&Ms.

In childhood, the scariest thing that can happen is being separated from a parent. I remember when I lost my mom in the supermarket. I, in a sea of legs, decided to follow a pair of black yoga pants without looking up to see who they belonged to. We wandered through the aisles, I bouncing after the legs that knew their way around the market better than I did. We reached some spot in the store, and I looked up, probably to point out something that I thought we ‘needed.’ I saw a different face for the first time. My whole body melted in that moment. I was suddenly lost, after being confident that I was safe.

Especially in times like these, where candidates from both major parties in America are questionable at best, news of mass murders come in from all around the world and many Americans don’t feel safe because of their skin color or sexual orientation, I find that the supermarket that I’m lost in has become a hellish dystopia of police killings, assassinations of policemen, and idiots proclaiming that their candidate can solve every ill within society (and even within the world.) Do I, after writing statements like this, have to acknowledge that my paranoia runs deeper than my confidence in my safety? Yes. But to ignore the fact that every time I’m in a densely-populated, public place, I fear losing my life to a bomb or gun is inane. The proverbial and literal bombs people are throwing at each other today cannot be ignored by my porous brain anymore. There’s no more bubble.

Within the aisle in the supermarket, this woman that I followed and I were both lost. The woman had no idea who I was, and I thought she was a devious character for wearing the same pants as my mother. The whirlwind of baking goods that surrounded us could only watch as she approached me to ask whom I belonged to. Just as this person bent down to my eye level, my mother rounded the corner, beckoning me over to her. I had never run so fast in my life. The sheer joy of seeing one of the first faces I remembered, every detail of it shocked my body. It fueled my whole being. What I worry about is that there might not be a mother rounding the corner for the U.S. or the world. There won’t be a flash of ecstatic emotions. I know that I won’t be able to grasp my mother’s hand like I did as a toddler ever again; but the world didn’t have someone like that in the first place.