"He doesn't know now that he's going to be okay."
He's only 9. He digs his heels into the fresh dirt and lets it cake to sole of his shoes, the breeze cutting through the grass that hugs his ankles. He thinks it's dumb that the day is bright and shining, the wind is gently blowing through his hair in a non-threatening way yet he's obligated to stand here like everything is okay. He thinks that it isn't fair that he's only smarter than everyone in his class because of all the time spent with nothing to do except read while the dirty walls of a sterile environment kept him closed in, yet he doesn't even have a friend to call his own anymore.
He doesn't know now that he's going to be okay. That he's going to fall in love at 15, 16, 18, 22 and 27. Or that he's going to have a kid, only one though because the kid that he gets is more than enough and he's pretty much tired of women always hurting him (and he supposes that the first hurt he ever received from a woman was on this day, watching his mother's dead corpse being lowered into the ground) but it's a pain that he becomes acutely familiar with. One day his son will ask him why women are so mean and he'll just smile and say that he's used to it.
He doesn't know now that he gets to do it all. That he wants to do it all and he makes a huge difference without ever really meaning to. There's a lot of things that he doesn't know now because he's only 9 and all he can think about is the way the wind presses against his eardrum and receiting passages from a book that he wasn't really ever supposed to read but no one had the heart to tell him no. He doesn't know a lot about his future, but he knows that right now he gets away with a lot of things he normally wouldn't.
He isn't stupid. He understands more than people think, gets that he doesn't even know his dad and now he'll never see his mom again. He's 9, not a baby anymore. He's not a baby anymore. He's not a baby anymore. He's not a baby anymore.
He's not a baby anymore...
His mom told him before she died that he can cry if he wants to. His grandpa told him that he doesn't have to smile if he doesn't feel like it. His grandma told him that he doesn't have to hold her hand but he can. He doesn't.
He doesn't cry.
He doesn't smile.
He doesn't hold her hand.
The dirt slides into the rivets of his soles, the ground beneath his feet flexing beneath his weight.
He's just a boy but he feels like he's expected to be a man.