The weight of knowing

There was a time when danger meant skinned knees and broken rules, when death was just a concept in movies and bedtime tales.

I remember that lightness, the weightless grace of not knowing, how easily I moved through the world before I learned its darker truths.

In the mountains, that innocence died a quick and violent death. No ceremony marked its passing, no grave holds its remains.

The first time I saw a man fall, something in me fell with him. A door slammed shut behind me; no way back to who I was before.

Now I carry knowledge like stones: the weight of a trigger pulled, the sound a life makes leaving, the smell of fear and gunpowder.

Some nights I dream of that other self, the one who never learned these things, who still believes in simple stories of good guys always winning.

But wisdom, once earned, can't be returned like borrowed books or borrowed time. The price of knowledge is permanence. Some things you can't unlearn.

Yet in this loss, I've found a truth: innocence was just a temporary grace. The real gift is moving forward, carrying both light and shadow.

I've learned to live with knowing, to shoulder the weight of experience, to find beauty in the broken places where innocence once lived.

For what replaces innocence isn't darkness, but understanding; a deeper way of seeing, a harder kind of grace.

And sometimes, in rare moments, when mountain peaks catch morning light, I feel a ghost of that old lightness, dancing just beyond my reach.

Not innocence, but acceptance, not ignorance, but peace, not the absence of darkness, but the courage to face it anyway.

This is the price of knowledge: to walk the world eyes wide open, carrying both its beauty and its pain, forever changed, but still alive.