What the children saw was that the way it was in the minds of the adults, was often unreasonably restricted. They could see into the histories, patterns, and habits into which the minds of their parents had collapsed. And they remembered this. It was important. It became the mission of many of us, in childhood, to devote ourselves to remembering, preserving, and responding to this disease. So that it wouldn’t be able to continue. And some of us still chase the mission, though most of us barely remember its inception.

But we, too, are subject to the strange gravity of the monster. We, too, are vulnerable, over time… to begin to play the way the adults did. In our minds. We crystalize. Our imagination fades or becomes the workhorse of grim purposes. Or both. Though we have the capacity to throw off the yolk of ‘the only ways’, many of us fall in the struggle. But we remember our childhood, and how it was with us. And the adults. We remember that the only ways quickly became… the lonely ways.