I was young, once. Newborn and squalling, too, I suppose; but the kind of young I'm talking about was all of the mind. I suffered the sort of blindness that comes from youth -- it's not that you don't see, it's that you don't understand. The body grew, the knowledge, too, facts and figures and imagination; but the comprehension, the interpretation -- that lagged behind.

Innocence. That's what I mean. Once, I was innocent.

It's difficult to recall, now. Sundered, and split -- that's how it seems I was, then. I see the movies, coming-of-age romps from the summers-we-were-twelve, first love, the birds and the bees, moving out on our own, all the classical movie-icons for lost innocence: I watch them play late-night on the television, but I don't understand them. Losing my innocence has never been something I regretted. Nor is innocence ever something I've mourned.

It's always about sex, have you noticed? Lost innocence. Kiss this boy, or that girl, and a world unveils before your eyes. The adult world, presumably, full of pitfalls and hormones and delusions of the heart. But I'll tell you this, now, for free: no kiss ever changed my world. No amount of tasting or touching, grunting or thrusting, not of my body, nor of anyone else's. It was another type of bump-in-the-night altogether that harvested my innocence.

It was the Agent with the wounded eyes, and the Killer with the scarred ones. It was the daemon in my shower, and the ghosts stretched pale and taut between them. It was a cold November midnight, and a candle flickering on the waters. It was... growth, and peace, and completion.

Sometimes, we wonder what happened to them, my daemon and I. To the ghosts they spawned, with their tortured hatelove and their twisted fears drawn stark and solid between them. Neither man saw enough to see them safe, those poor malformed ghostlings; yet they were never quite blind enough to let them free, either. Instead, they probably shattered most of them in the passions of their passing. It's usually what happens, when two such mismatched souls get thrown so sharply and inextricably one against t'other. Especially when both have eyes enough to glimpse what it is they form; but not eyes enough to care.

And sometimes, we know. The one with the wounded eyes, the federal Agent: they scarred, one night. He woke that morning and could no longer see the world not tinted by old hurts. And the scarred one: his faded. That morning, he saw the world whole for the first time, and it wounded him. And so the Agent of law became the Agent of destruction, and the Killer became the saviour after truth: and the cycle was maintained.

But sometimes, it didn't after all happen that way. Sometimes, they healed together; and sometimes, they healed apart. Sometimes they remained as they were, and lost. Sometimes the Killer redeemed the Agent, and sometimes the Agent damned the Killer. Sometimes they averted war between them, and sometimes they destroyed all peace. And some days, they even saved us all -- when they didn't drag us into hell screaming with them.

Yet none of that's evident today, as my daemon and I look at the brittle ice and the fickle fire. Today there is only is, and was, and the certainty that some men become what they were born for. There is only stone, and wood, and a step back from war. Or the thin edge of laughter wounding the water, or both. And underpinning it all, the sure knowledge that we have to trust.

Because, sometimes...

Thanks to Pollyanna for the poem: