The Last Page of a Childhood

It ends quietly,
not with a curtain call or a farewell song,
but with the slow turning of a page
you do not even notice in the moment.
One day you are barefoot in the grass,
mud-crowned and sun-drunk,
laughter spilling careless as water from a broken jar.
The next,
the air tastes different—
heavier, sharper,
charged with consequences that never existed before.

Childhood does not announce its departure.
It slips away while you sleep,
leaving only echoes:
the thrum of a skipping rope on pavement,
the tang of pennies pressed into palms,
the small rebellion of scraped knees
and grass stains your mother could never quite scrub out.
The currency of wonder loses its value overnight.
Play becomes indulgence.
Honesty becomes risk.
And the wild, reckless abandon of youth
is traded for caution,
for silence,
for the long apprenticeship of restraint.

How radiant it was—
to speak without calculation,
to laugh without shame,
to let hair tumble ungoverned in the wind,
to believe the world was endless
and always would be.
That innocence was a kind of opulence,
a wealth squandered only because we did not know
how finite it was.

We never realise,
as we stand on the threshold,
that the book is closing.
That the last page is turning.
That childhood, once left,
is a country you can never re-enter.
You may revisit its stories,
you may re-read its chapters
in the quiet theatre of memory,
but you cannot step back into its fields,
cannot reclaim its abandon,
cannot live again inside its unbroken trust.

And so we grieve it—
not always aloud,
but in the marrow of our days.
We grieve in the long commutes,
in the careful words swallowed before they wound,
in the weight of keys and bills and responsibility.
We grieve every time we glimpse our reflection
and see not the child we were,
but the adult who must carry that child’s absence.

The last page of a childhood
is never enough.
It leaves us hungry for just one more paragraph,
one more dusk of fireflies,
one more morning of unmeasured joy.
But the book is closed.
And all that remains
is the rearview mirror of memory—
a story beloved,
a story mourned,
a story we can never again inhabit,
no matter how often we whisper its lines to ourselves in the dark.

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