Our Calculated World

When I was a little girl, the world couldn't contain my imagination.

I was the one who would look at the moon and wonder what it would look like, how brightly it would shine, if it was twice as big.

I could look outside and still see magic, even after equations and facts were drilled into my head.

I made wishes on airplanes because sometimes, ther were no stars; and if they light up in the black satin sky, isn't it all just the same?

Imagination gave a mysterious mask to life.

We couldn't know everything.

We didn't know everything.

I didn't know everything.

So we fill in the holes with tales like cement because reality has holes that don't make sense to our sense-seeeking brains.

The "Age of Science" title of grandeur, claim in the land of brilliance means nothing.

Imagination still prevails.

And yet, we demean it.

We tell children to grow up and rob them of the jewel, the crystal ball that shows them beauty in our calculated world.

We stab them with laws and theorems and drain their infantile mind until there's nothing left.

And then they are incarcerated in prisons of adulthood because we told them to grow up, and we still blame them!

"The world is a cold place just because," we say, but we froze it over.

We killed it with our rejection of innocence; our crusade against the dreams that make children so pure, unlike anything this world has left.

And some teach their children to do it.

Some raise their children into calculated warriors who wield information like some sort of sadistic sword.

Some tell their children to turn their noses up at the mere scent of a dream and to poke holes in it until the beautiful little mind who came up with it falls like a dying angel and accepts the poisoned gospel.

My imagination was my weapon, the only way I knew to fight back against the cynics who tried to kill me.

But eventually, even I fell down to a cold, very real earth.

Some say it's terrible to have your head in the clouds, to be stuck in a dream for the rest of your life, and they are right.

Dreaming without knowing that you are dreaming is torture.

Choosing to stay in the dream because it is easy; that cannot be justified.

But tell me that you agree when I say that having access to daydreams, to fantasies filled with visions of what is to come; of an easy life; of a world where one can smile and feel happiness like blood in their hearts.

That is never a bad thing.

To have an escape from the prison of adulthood, the torturous chambers of all work and no play, is never a bad thing.

But here I am with only memories of my innocence because I was told to grow up. 

And I can't thank my lucky stars anymore because they don't exist; they're just airplanes flying by in the wind like the crumbled remains of my wishes.

I can't look at the moon and wonder what would happen to the Earth and her people if it were to change because I know the horrific results.

I can't find the magic in nature anymore because instead, I see formulas, chemicals, equations that veil the mystery in a fog.

Being smart, knowing things, understanding the world are not bad things.

It's when those become so powerful that they blind people to the magic that the poison sets in the mind.

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