Shadows of Childhood

For as long as I can remember, I have been alone. Since I was five, when I stopped being “pretty and sweet” for my mother, loneliness became my only companion. Even the memories I try to recall are just shadows; I want to long for something warm and safe, but the truth is it never existed.

I was a child, yes, but children can be alone too, and nobody talks about it. Nobody sees how abandonment and indifference can sink so deep that it feels like a hole in your chest. I was bullied from a very young age, beaten by life before I even learned to defend myself, and the hugs I imagined never came. Every happy memory I try to hold onto feels blurry, almost fake, as if my mind is trying to invent something to soothe me, even if it’s not real.

I have many photos of myself as a child. In them, I smile, I look happy, as if everything was fine. But when I look at them, the feeling that hits me is deep and painful; it shatters me. I see myself so happy that it hurts, like I am living a life that isn’t mine. It’s a brutal contrast: the reflection of a smiling child and the truth of a loneliness that was always there.

My childhood had no protection or tenderness; there were abuses, screams, hits, mockery, and looks that erased me. And yet, I long for something that never even existed, because the craving for human warmth doesn’t care about the truth: it hurts the same to feel you never had what everyone else seemed to have. My memories are fragments of emptiness and solitude, mixed with the sensation that something very important was taken from me before I could even understand what love or safety was.

Nostalgia doesn’t transport me to happy days; it reminds me of absence, abandonment, and the constant need for affection that no one knew how to give me. I feel the caress that never came, the hug that never held me, the company that never taught me how to trust. Childhood loneliness doesn’t disappear; it lingers, consumes, and seeps into your skin and bones. And still, I’m here, trying to understand how I survived all of this and how I keep searching for something that maybe never existed.