before knowing

a creature, an animal, who lacks knowledge of the boundaries imposed by history, pressure, tradition, and family, and is therefore in a superpositional state of compliance and complete disregard for their meaning, able to run freely and without concern for limbs and consequences, out of any situation that arises, a listener and follower who believes itself independent mainly by virtue of its own ignorance, blind faith and happy compliance to expectation and dogma and ritual, a beating heart and warm body with no fight or resistance, mainly being berated, or running freely and told it was dirty, hoping to be found or lost in alternating weeks
a desiccated and glumly translucent husk
the realisation of an outside culture cast a light into that emptiness
the lack of shadow left it altered and aghast in crushing shame and grief at its loneliness and desperate
stuffing itself with other people’s life, ravenously devouring the world as if nothing but everything could sate its irrepressible instinct to know and understand
alone, again, after chewing through it all and learning nothing