The Things a Child Shouldn't Know

They said children make things up
pretend friends,
imagined whispers,
worlds stitched from play.
But the ones who sat beside me
were too heavy with sorrow,
too filled with unfinished stories,
to be made of pretend.

Truth has a temperature.
The living are warm.
The dead move like cold breath
against your skin.

I felt both.

Voices slipped into my days
like shadows learning to speak
soft, persistent,
telling me things
my small hands
were never meant to carry.

But the one I remember most
was her.

A woman glowing with expectancy,
smiling in the dim light,
hands resting on her belly
like a promise.

Yet all I felt
was absence.

No spark curled beneath her ribs,
no heartbeat humming
through the quiet
only a silence
that belonged to another realm.

I didn’t know the word
for a child who has already left
before its mother knows to mourn.
I only knew
that she held both love and loss
in the same breath.

Hours later,
the doctor would name the truth
her body had not yet accepted.
But before the daylight broke,
before grief found her,
I felt the emptiness
press its cold palm
against my chest.

I learned early
to swallow visions whole
to hide them behind my teeth
before grown faces twisted
with fear they never meant to show.

Adults did not want truth.
They wanted comfort,
and I had none to offer.

So I stayed quiet.
Held the knowing alone.
Played with my toy tractor
as if it could muffle the ache
of being a child
who was never meant
to see such things.

Some truths arrive early,
long before language,
long before permission
and they carve themselves
into the softest parts of you.

These were the things
a child should never know,
and yet
they became the first ghosts
to follow me home.