Crayons break in your hands and scatter,

Streak across paper, smudge across your desk

But when it’s time to clean up, there is a song, and a song, and a song

You hand your classmates things, you sweep the floors,

The word childhood just meant life and it was through childhood in which you learned your first lesson:

Kindness.

Kindness an instinct as easy and breathing, or flinching away from a hot stove.

An unspoken word, spoken in plenty of other ways.

You were taught this through rhyme, through parents who loved

From a childhood who loved you back.

Childhood is all overalls and the same book overread until you wear the ink on your fingers

Childhood gets strawberries on her shirt and remembers the smell of homemade cheese and crackers.

There are many metaphors for childhood,

There isn’t a metaphor for what it means to be kind.

It’s just handing people things. It’s Sharing is Caring. It’s the Golden Rule.

It’s not a choice, here.

Though when you are taller, when your hands have their veins visible

Sometimes you give to someone who takes,

Sometimes you lean into someone who isn’t there,

Sometimes you have nothing but air under your toes and you just have to keep walking until you notice it.

Sometimes you lash out, because you forget, and you forget, and you forget.

And then there is no option to be kind, simply to become it.

The first time I took malice in my hands and set it down, I was barely nineteen years old.

I swallowed it.

I ate it for breakfast.

I spit it up for lunch.

I burned it into canvas,

Flecked it all over my furniture, spilt it onto the rug.

I tried to shove it where my teeth were,

Sometimes it worked.

It became so much easier to keep my mouth shut, than when I was a child.

And while I still spoke, I watched my tongue,

I cut it on the malice behind my molars

And I chose, and I chose, and I chose

And I was no longer, and I had been no longer, and my mouth no longer

Instinct became my memory,

Decision became my affirmed.

Child became my inside,

And kind became my out.