Month: January 2015

Darkness.

Everyone is fast asleep in the safety of their beds. A sharp tap of the oak’s fingers attacks your window as it dies slowly in the night. Owls howl with their pathetic repletion of wisdom as grass sways to the orders of a subtle breeze. Midnight clouds float seamlessly across the sky as if escaping the horrors that emerge after day.

Everything is dark, almost pitch black, but there is enough light creeping in from outside to outline a small, uninteresting room. Fluorescent star-shaped stickers glow a dim green at the ceiling of your bedroom. Dead, rotting posters decorate your walls, childhood crayon drawings cling on for dear life at the side of your table. You seem merely a small lump in the dark brown covers that lay on the mattress when I recognise you. I see you stirring in what seems to be a deep sleep. My feet shuffle across the dark-green carpet that seems invisible on top of the rough, wooden floor. My hands lean onto a wall to keep my balance and instantly flinch. That wall, the one adjoining your parents’ room, it reeks of death.

A short wooden stool stands between the door and your bed, it restricts my ability to watch you sleep. I lift the stool, but a solitary leg hangs below the rest, scraping as it moves across the floorboard.

Once again you duck your head slightly and curl up into a ball. The sound must have woken you up, it always does. Even through the covers I can tell that the last cobwebs of sleep have withered from your mind, a fog that hangs over your senses, remaining through your delusion of lucidity.

Silence.

I see you’re not scared any more. Are you about to look up out of your covers? Your duvet is moving slightly, your arms are extending, and I can see it. Yes, show me your foot, take it out of your covers.  I grab your foot and smother you before you scream, it’s always such an unpleasant noise isn’t it? As I look you straight in the eyes they roll backwards.

You were my best friend.
Why did you leave me?

We share so many memories.

Yes, those memories, let’s go back to three years ago. It’s instantly day time, the sweet smell of optimism and youth fills the summer air as children run and play. Grass is swaying above the dirt as it does this night, except the trees that were scattered around the park had been given such life, as if it had been breathed into them by the surrounding blue jays that sung with celestial joy. An ocean of heads and laughter hit your senses, so staggering you fall on your knees and tighten your eyelids in pain. You’re standing in that field.
They laughed at you. Those kids. They insulted you because of me, and you betrayed me, you denied any existence of me. You began throwing away my drawings and stopped talking to me. Your ‘loving’ mother said that it was about time. She was the first to go.

In a blink you stood at her funeral, you’re hit with the sharp piercing pain of winter. The men in sombre black stood, circled around her grave, their hands shaking in the cold unforgiving air. Children that seemed to cling onto the black-clothed men began throwing lilies onto the coffin as you turned away from the people and cried. Tears slowly dripped from your face and onto the mud that surrounded the willow you leaned upon. A man put his arm on your shoulder but you bawled and started pounding at him with your fists, several more men gathered around you and held you down. You lay on the muddy floor, the dirt that lay with you left brown stains on your suit but you didn’t care. That was when I stood above you, tears fell down our faces, you blacked out, and I ceased to exist.

You were eight years old right?
What did I do wrong?

Your stomach lurches at the third and final memory, you’re in the same place as before, except you stand alone. There was no man to hold you, no woman to guide you. The gravestone you face belongs to the only other man you knew who held your last name. Frost glistens on the stone as the snow begins to fall, your chest starts shaking uncontrollably as you fall to your knees once again. Frozen hands shakily raise to your frost-bitten cheeks as tears fall through the gaps in your fingers; your eyes raw and as broken as your young heart. Your eyelids clench shut and you begin to whimper. Why me? I hear you try to force between choking sobs. Why does it have to be me?

We snap back to present day. Your memorable blue eyes turn to me knowingly, before widening in fear. Tears slowly fall down our faces.

And once again, I ceased to exist.

Good evening London, today I will be portraying what I feel on the matter of parental guidance on the internet. I guess this topic is highly debatable seeing as this is probably a touchy subject because it criticizes the actions of adults and how they choose to raise their children, but nonetheless, this really needs to be, in a sense, brought to light.

Children are naturally curious, being brought up in a world where everything is hidden would defeat the purpose of growing up and adults need to start understanding that. I mean – not that I condone the advertisement of ‘Adult things’ to children, it’s just that they should be aware of the dangers. Such as betting sites and the element of stranger danger. Of course, the odd porno or any other ‘terrifying’ thing would pop out of nowhere and onto your child’s computer screen, but that wouldn’t occur if you remove your cookies and/ or history- (heheh).

Okay, I can tell some of you guys feel  offended about what I just said but children deserve a bit of adventure in their lives, of course the off ‘scary picture’ would pop out and shock your child, but that’s all part of learning isn’t it? What I’m trying to say is that even if something is blocked on the internet there are always a way around it, causing your child to have a hard time doing so, but ultimately having access to the website nonetheless, but opening up and allowing them to search the web and learning from their mistakes (obviously with some parental guidance) they can and will be able to grow up successfully in the digital age.

Do you honestly want your children to grow up feeling owned by someone else? Being overprotective may not result in an obedient, loving child but a rebellious, freedom loving teenager in later years. The only way around that is if you restrict your child’s communication with the outside world, but that would plainly make you an unfit parent.

The noun, Parental Guidance is useless, well, it does work very well to box up someone’s knowledge if they are in an environment where grown up things aren’t really mentioned like in primary schools but as they progress to higher forms of education they can and will have access to what they want. What parents really need to understand that mirroring their protective nature on a child’s internet access where the parent’s control is very limited does not work, well, most of the time?

I will conclude this rant with something a friend of mine one said: ‘We worry so much about out offspring that we tend to forget that the next generation deserves to truly become the next generation, not a carbon copy of the previous one’.