A Misfit Among Misfits - A Child In Two Parts

Do you ever wonder
What led up to who you are
How the path that you made
Gave you strength and made its scar

Do you ever think to imagine
What things could have been like
If you made a different move
Went away from that turnpike

Consider a child
In their homeland
Unaware of what a path even is
So aloof from reality
Simply enjoying fantasy
As much as the days can bring
For as long as they still is

Now imagine in this land
Constant strife politically
Life affected by chaos each day
Reporters with bad news on display

Time to leave! Time to leave!
While that still is a prerogative
Take what you can and go
And leave what was once your home

Still as a child
They wouldn’t know any better
Moving from home
Just means having different weather
But they can’t come back
Not for a good while
A new home has to be made
Where they reside now

Only as that child grew
To a teen with some issues
To an adult finding their way
Did they get
Why life was not the same

From there it would occur to them
What they were robbed of
Of what would complete them
Give form to their self image
Provide the whole picture for them
Rather than leave them with just a hole

But fortunately they left the home
A home now in flames by the very forces
That forced the child to leave their home
And left them with the hole
That made them half and half of who they are

That child wonders what could have been
Had they stayed back where they were
Succored by the knowledge they got
An idea emerges of what might’ve occurred

“I would be more certain of my place
More aware of my own culture
That I think would be the case
Had I not made this rupture

Yet I’d be bitter and malnourished
More passionate in my anger
In this land I have flourished
Back there there’s nothing but clangor

That me which stayed at home
Might know more of what is theirs
But feel trapped under the dome
Scrounging about to peddle wares

The misery, tragedy and horror
That embodies my alternate
Would have them an early mourner
While I hardly seen my family in that grim fate

What decisions would I make
Pressed against the nation’s wall
Death back home can be by mistake
And it’s easy to trip into freefall

If they survived by some luck
I’d doubt they would be calm
Hardened by being thrown amuck
To triumph over their greatest qualm

If I met that self, they’d hate me
The decisions that I’ve become
They had to work so hard to be free
And yet I didn’t, therefore I’m scum

They’d hate my cultural illiteracy
They’d hate my efforts at sympathy
They’d hate me considerably
They’d hate how I think so differently”

So the child wonders
Now old enough to think beyond
What can’t be changed by time
Of the fate that they were able to abscond

Though the net good remains higher
Than what is in the negative
What remains absent from the divergence
Stays gone for as long as they live