Before we knew our names, you taught us to speak. 

A wordless language we did not know but understood nonetheless. Just like a child understands a mother’s smile or a father’s embrace. Eager to learn, we were like newborns yearning for milk. Craving something we could not express, but knew we needed. 

“Wait a little longer,” you said. “There’s a long road ahead.” 

When we discovered pain, you were there to wipe our tears. You held us in your arms, waiting for the sobs to subside. Then you whispered tenderly, cautiously, that as much as it hurt, there was always someone hurting more than us. We felt foolish, and our tears dried quicker than a spill on searing asphalt. We were hurt again, and the pain returned, but never again did the tears fall. 

“Don’t give up,” you said. “It always works out in the end.” 

You taught us to be the bigger person, walk the extra mile, count our blessings, and pray for those who couldn’t pray for themselves. Sometimes we understood. Sometimes, we didn’t want to understand. But you were patient, and you pushed us to be the same. 

“There’s always a reason to be good,” you said. “There’s enough bad in the world.” 

When we thought we were ready, you proved us wrong. We came back crawling on bleeding knees with bruised pride, and you drew us into your shadows. It was dark, but we felt safe. It was cold, but at least we were alive. When the loneliness became too heavy to bear, you reminded us of the sun. 

“It’s not your time yet,” you said. “Dream while you still can.” 

So, we dreamed. We dreamed of castles, and wings, and crowns too heavy to bear. Things that glittered and glowed. Things beyond our reach. Precious things, dangerous things. 

But we also dreamed of hope. While we waited in your shadows, we remembered the words you instilled in our hearts. We dreamed of a glorious black and white future governed by peace and faith in each other. A world where happiness is the currency and the native tongue is that wordless language of old. We were naïve, but we were young. 

“Too young,” you said. 

Too young, too hopeful, too proud, too late. 

We crept out of your shelter, with stiff necks and cramped stances, unaware of the challenge that lay before us. The light was blinding, but it felt real. Little did we know that reality was harsher than a little sun in our eyes.

You told us to dream but handed us a world too broken to hold them. A childhood spent in futile nurturing; we watched our innocent fantasies bleed through the cracks. 

“Too weak,” you said. “Dream stout dreams.”

Eager to please, we dreamt bigger. Harder. Pushed ourselves to fit the molds carved out for us. When did you carve them? Maybe they had always been there, and it was us who were too dumb to realize. Too foolish.

We replaced the innocence with competition, the fantasies with ambition — struggled to navigate the waves of expectation and prejudice, with dwindling hopes and anxious thoughts. Unsurprisingly, we crashed. Hard. But when we turned to you, you smiled at us. Indecipherable smiles stretched across stained teeth, tinged red with your own blood. You threw us life belts inflated with hypocrisy, and we clung to them in desperation. We would have been better off drowning. 

“Try harder,” you said. “It’s not enough.”

But it was never enough. The higher we climbed, the taller the mountain grew. No matter how hard we tried, we were always hidden by someone’s silhouette. So close to the peak, but not close enough. Our bodies burned with each pull forward, but it was nothing compared to the burning in our souls. You once told us that there was always someone in greater pain, but surely no one could have suffered more than us! 

“What’s the matter?” you said. “Didn’t you want to rule the world?”

Too thick, too hard, too little, too much. 

With exhausted groans, we threw off our yokes, vowing to be better. But how could we? How can we be better when we have forgotten what is good? 

“There’s always a reason to be good,” you said. Well, where is that reason now?

You wanted us to fix the world, but without disturbing the order in your chaos. You told us to break through your barriers without shattering the glass, like attempting to unclog a drain without pulling out the debris. While you sit in your palaces of conscious ignorance, we attempt to clean the streets saturated with the filth of your lies and your pretentious systems, burdened by wrongs not our own. 

“You’ll understand when you’re older,” you said. “Trust us; it’s for the best.”

How can you know what’s best when you can’t even see past your own faults? Are we still too young to understand? When we are covered in the consequences of your sins and are standing among the carcasses of our slaughtered hopes, can you still ask us to trust you?

All our lives, we believed in a distorted reflection, blindly trusting the words of those before us. But now the fog has cleared. If we look hard enough, our dreams of old still lay buried deep inside us, waiting to be sharpened, polished. 

“You’re making a mistake,” you said. “Your dreams will destroy you.”

We see you watching us from the shadows, tracking our every movement in the light. We can feel your eyes on us, your cynical looks of scorn. You are waiting — waiting for us to make a mistake. 

“You better watch your step,” you said. “You can’t win forever.” 

Where did you go wrong? What about those words you whispered to us, those visions you instilled in our raw minds? Were they lies as well? Bedtime stories you conjured up to help us sleep? Or have you forgotten your own words? 

In some ways, you were better than us. You were humbler, kinder, stronger. But we are strong, too. No one taught us to save the world, so we learn from our mistakes. We fail every day and, sometimes, it seems like we can never be truly, beautifully good. But you set the race, and if we can force change only by winning, then we’ll run, even if it pains every fiber of our beings. That is our strength—the strength to run. 

We run so that we can speak. Even if we haven’t mastered that unspoken language yet, we will speak the truth. Speak, shout, scream, whisper. Too long has it been hidden, concealed by forced smiles and averted eyes. Don’t air your dirty laundry in public, you said. But how can we not, when the water itself needs cleansing? How can we keep our laundry clean when the water in our basins is murky? 

“Hide it,” you said. “Don’t let the world know.” 

No more can we return to silence. That choice is sealed forever. For the river to be clean, the city needs to change. For the city to change, we must find our voice. You tried to hush us, cover our mouths like embarrassed parents trying to quell a child’s cries. We were mocked, abused, and disregarded. But we won’t give up. You taught us not to. We will relearn that ancient language, that wordless tongue we learned at our mother’s breast, and we will revive it. 

We cannot rule a broken world, so we’ll do what we do best. We’ll fix it. With clasped hands and heads held high, we will mend the cracks. But the scars will remain, we will make sure of it. Our scars teach us who we were, and one day, when we forget, these scars will remind us and those after us. Because we need to remember. We are forced to be who we are today because you forgot. We might make mistakes, but we won’t make the same ones as you. 

One day, when the sun goes down on your lives, we will be building our castles. Real, strong fortresses, not fragile castles made of sand. Castles in the sky far from where your bones lie buried in the ground below, hidden in death as in life. We will fill our rooms with your lessons, and we will grow, give, thank, and pray. And when those after us begin to build their own castles, God give us the grace to teach them to dream.