WHEN LIFE CHANGED IT'S MIND

I used to think families were permanent. Not just the people in them, but the way they made you feel. Safe. Protected. Certain. When I was little, I never understood why adults worried so much about money. I knew money was something my parents used to buy things, but I never understood what it meant to not have enough of it. As far as I knew, things were always there. If I needed a new pair of shoes for school, somehow my father would find the money. If school asked for something, my mother would remind me not to forget it. If I came home hungry, there was food. It wasn't a perfect life. But it was ours. My father was the one who provided for us. He worked hard, and I knew that because sometimes I would watch him leave home early in the morning while the rest of us were still waking up. I never asked where exactly he was going. Children don't usually ask questions about the things that make their lives comfortable. They simply accept them. My mother stayed at home. She was the kind of mother who seemed to know where everything was. She knew which child had lost a book, who had eaten the last piece of something, who needed to wake up for school, and who was pretending to be asleep. Our home was noisy. There was always someone talking. Someone laughing. Someone complaining. Sometimes there were arguments over things that seemed extremely important at the time and completely ridiculous years later. I loved it. I loved coming home from school and knowing someone would be there I loved knowing that if something scared me, I could run to my parents. I loved believing that tomorrow would look almost exactly like today. I had no reason to believe otherwise. At that age, I thought adults knew everything. I thought parents couldn't disappear. I thought families didn't fall apart. I thought difficult seasons were things that happened to other people. And perhaps that was the innocence of childhood. You don't know how fragile life is because nobody has taught you yet. So you simply live. You laugh. You go to school. You make friends. You complain when your mother tells you to do something you don't want to do. You dream about the person you will become one day. And you assume the people standing beside you will still be there when you finally become that person. I didn't know how quickly a normal life could become a memory. I didn't know that one year could divide your life into before and after. I didn't know that one day, I would look back at those ordinary afternoons and wish I could return to them. At the time, though, I was just Talia. A girl who believed she had plenty of time. A girl who thought her family would always be together. A girl who had no idea that life was already preparing to teach her otherwise.