So let’s begin.
The Genesis
Chapter 2
I was five the first time I understood I belonged to a building instead of a person. By then, my biological parents had already slipped out of the story.
I don’t remember their faces. No blurred image of a mother in a doorway, no father pausing like he might change his mind.
What I have instead is a corridor. Long, pale-lit and echoing like hell.
The kind of hallway where every footstep sounds like it belongs to someone who has authority over you, and usually does.
Doors opening somewhere out of sight. Voices carrying, then thinning out. The smell of soap, damp wool, old linoleum.
I remember those things more clearly than touch. A child learns fast in a place like that, that attention isn’t given freely.
Care arrives on a schedule. Affection, if it shows up at all, tends to come with conditions. I didn’t have language for any of this then. I only knew the building had rules you felt before anyone said them, and surviving there meant learning them before they were used on you.
You learned which footsteps meant trouble. Which doors slammed harder in winter. Which adults might let a small thing slide, and which wouldn’t. That was its own kind of education.
No one called it that, of course. They called it care.
The orphanage stood in the poorest part of the city. You could see it in the cracked pavement, in the facades shedding paint in long curls, in the way neglect seemed older than the people living inside it.
The fence around the grounds wasn’t high enough to keep anyone out, just high enough to remind you where not to go. They called it a children’s home.
I learned early that institutions give soft names to hard places.
My first clear memory is a room with six beds. Metal frames, thin mattresses, and a window that never fully closed, letting winter in every year. I was handed folded clothes and shown which bed was mine. That was the extent of the welcome.
No one crouched to explain where I was or how long I’d stay.
A child learns quickly not to ask questions when no one intends to answer. Even quicker, he learns which questions are safer left alone.
I remember the smell of damp wool rising from coats hung too close together. The springs in the mattresses complaining when someone turned at night. The cold in the floorboards before dawn.
Those are the things that stayed with me.
The room already had its order before I entered it. Who slept near the window. Who wet the bed. Which boy stole bread and hid it under his mattress.
I understood none of it at first, only that I had stepped into something already in motion, something that would go on whether I learned its rules or not.
That realization comes early in places like that. You are not received, you are absorbed.
The first lesson wasn’t obedience; it was erasure.
How little sound to make. How little of yourself to show. How to become easy to overlook. There were rules for everything. Behavior and gratitude were some of the most important ones.
We were reminded often that we were fortunate. We had food, shelter, and the staff didn’t beat us.
All of it was true. But there are forms of neglect that don’t leave bruises.
A child can go untouched and still grow up starved. People misunderstand that. They think damage is visible. That if no one raised a hand, then little harm was done. It is a comforting lie,but a lie nonetheless.
What goes missing can wound as deeply as what is inflicted, sometimes even deeper.
A child notices what never arrives. A hand not placed on a fevered forehead. A question never asked.
