Where have all the children gone?

The creaking silence of longing echoes through the streets. It sounds like the old, wooden floors under dainty feet of all the children running around. Just yesterday they were tying ribbons in their hair and swinging from the branches of their favourite trees.

Their laughs used to flood the home. Toys were scattered all over the floor, always being played with at any free moment they had. New, colourful worlds used to be scribbled onto blank pieces of paper, each more magnificent than the previous. These children were our blank canvas- a fresh start for us.

Where have all the children gone?

Bleached skin and teary eyes is all they are now. The only human contact that they get is the back of a hand across their gentle cheek. Their world is just a long line of sad faces, long hours of forced work, and short times of rest. They are forced to become someone new, being told that their old self is ‘ugly’ and ‘unlovable’. They spend hours learning a language that they cannot use outside of the walls they are trapped in.

Those of us who were spared wander around like abandoned kids lost in the woods. The lights in our lives are gone. We do not know what to do without them here, there is no one to guide, no one to tell stories to.

We were told that we were a bad influence on them. The world thought that we were ‘savages’ and that they were saving our children of having the same fate as us. But, who has the right to steal a child away from their mother and call it just? What is a child without their mother’s tender nurture and words of wisdom?

Where have all the children gone?

They came back to us too late. They want to be excited to finally be home, but they cannot. They are just a broken shell of who they were. Their parents talk to them, trying to give them words of love, but they cannot understand. Their language and way of life before is completely erased. There is nothing from the past left.

We had hoped that they were just hiding. We had hoped that they were just playing a trick on us. We had hoped that those years of their absence was just a bad dream. But we know that this was all real. That the children we once knew and loved are gone.