I didn’t think of these as philosophy. They were closer to shelter. And there was comfort in making order where none had been offered. Perhaps every child does this in some form. Mine only became unusually explicit.
I wrote some of them down later. Others I carried without words. But I can trace a certain cast of mind back to those first private rules.
The beginning of a loyalty to my own observations over what I was told. Those were the early ones. Later, they grew darker,though at eleven philosophy still lived in a simpler language. Or perhaps harsher is the better word.
Children do not usually arrive at principles through abstraction. They arrive at them through repetition. Through what keeps happening.
I remember one rule especially clearly.
It came while I sat alone in the yard during outdoor hours. Children were shouting across the concrete, chasing a ball that had lost most of its air, and their laughter carried strangely in the cold.
I remember watching them run and feeling, not envy exactly, but distance, as though they inhabited an assumption I no longer shared. It struck me then that they still believed the world would notice them. That someone, somewhere, was keeping track. That if things became too unfair, some hand would enter the scene and correct it. I had stopped believing that long before I had words for having stopped.
So the rule became:no one is coming.
Life becomes simpler when you stop expecting rescue.
There was a severity in that thought, yes, but also relief. Because once rescue is no longer part of the equation, disappointment loosens its grip. You begin dealing only with what is. For a child, that can feel almost like freedom.
I have never entirely escaped that rule.
Perhaps no one ever escapes the first truths that make survival feel possible. After a while, that belief settled in me like stone.
Days passed, then weeks, maybe months, and time blurred back into the old routine.
Breakfast, lessons, outdoor hours, dinner, silence.
The kind of repetition that starts by structuring a child and ends by hollowing him out. The funny thing is, once routine empties itself out enough, it can begin to feel almost comforting.
The inner world grew larger than it had ever been. Larger, in some ways, than the world around me. And there is a kind of peace in withdrawing so completely that almost nothing can reach you anymore.
Not healthy peace, obviously.
More like the peace of shutting down a system that keeps overloading. But at eleven, I would have called it peace.
For a while, I thought I might stay there forever, inside that carefully arranged interior life, where everything obeyed rules I understood. It had a logic the real world often lacked. And, if I’m honest, it had better company. But reality has a way of interrupting even the most well-built illusions.
It happened on an ordinary afternoon.
I was sitting at the edge of the yard, tracing the outline of an old scar along my arm with my thumb. The concrete beneath me still held the warmth of the sun. Children moved around me in loud, careless circles, full of the kind of heedless energy I had always watched more than joined.
A staff member called my name. Once, maybe twice.
Then a hand entered my field of vision.
“Rowan.”
I looked up. She was smiling, which was unusual enough to unsettle me.
In places like that, smiles from staff usually meant paperwork or trouble. Sometimes both.
“You’re coming with me.”
We walked down the familiar hallway, harsh lights humming overhead. The same smell of detergent and cooked vegetables drifted through the air, but the office she led me to was not one I usually entered. I noticed that immediately. Children who grow up in institutions become cartographers of doors. We know which ones matter.
Inside, two people were waiting. A man and a woman.
They didn’t look like staff. They had not yet acquired that exhausted institutional look the others carried.
