There was one day where I volunteered to assist my Teaching Artist at a different elementary school. She teaches 3rd grade there, a bit different from the 5th graders we verbally wrestle around up at the Harlem school.
To start off with, the classrooms were... just about the coziest spaces I could imagine. Round tables, little chairs, posters and visuals arranged over the walls, shelves filled with baskets of books, student work clipped on the clotheslines strung across the room.
And the kids were so little, so well-behaved. I relaxed and walked around with colored pencils, pausing every so often to smile at one kid or another as they gazed at me, curious and sweet.
I sat down at this one table that had chairs open, and watched the little boy and girl across from me. They were working away, upper bodies bent over in concentration, but at the same time so involved in each other's work, offering up ideas and flipping them over like coins, exclaiming over the shininess of inspiration.
And perhaps it's true what they say, about the innocence of childhood, the purity that washes away with time. There they were, one boy and one girl, content in each other's company. Before appearances mattered. Before the questions of status and background, the myriad implications and fleeting attractions.
I felt then, how much I wished to love someone.
And how wrong it is, to think that innocence resides only in the ignorance of childhood. That we are doomed to grasp backwards for what is forever lost. Because there is a place beyond the judged appearances, beyond the loaded questions and ever-vexing implications, past where you have known them all already, known them all and it is they (judged, loaded, and ever-vexing) who are washing away in irrelevance and everything is simple again.
Because innocence is believing.