beginning of the end of innocence

I loved you for your mind until it seeped from your body in whisky sweat and beer shits. I loved the way you could turn a phrase, and then the phrases turned against you.

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I was hiding under my bed. My child's logic had convinced me that the cover of bed would protect me from the impending world's end I had been warned about the day before.
"The world is gonna end tomorrow at two pee emm," Eric had told me, quite matter-of-factly, as we sat on the lawn playing with trucks and wooden blocks.
"How do you know?" I had asked.
"My dad told me."
In my three year old mind's eye, the sky ripped open from one end to the other. The sun turned a cold white nothing as clouds of black locusts swarmed to engulf us. "Oh," I muttered.

"What are you doing under there?" It was my father. I had been discovered. I peered out from behind the pink dust ruffle at warm blue eyes, crinkled softly at the corners. He was on his hands and knees, smiling jovially. I wrinkled my brow and sniffled. "Jana? Why are you under the bed?"
I shrugged and looked away. So, he doesn't know. Oh, how could it be possible, not only to be lashed to this heavy burden of knowledge, but now to have to break the news to my darling father. I couldn't bear it; I couldn't stand to be the harbinger of such terrible news. I squeezed my eyes closed tight against the sobs pushing upward.
"Sweetheart, what's wrong?"
I crawled further back into the confines of under-the-bed, curling into a tight ball and hugging myself against the impending disaster of nothingness I could not dare disclose. I sobbed uncontrollably for a moment, and then I felt a hand on my shoulder and looked up. "I can't help you if you don't tell me what's wrong." His soft eyes had grown wide with concern. "Did you hurt yourself?"
My only response was a choke of tears. How, how could I tell him the awful truth?
"Jana?" he asked again, tugging gently on my arm. My tears continued, unfazed. He gripped my arm harder. "Jana," he said, his voice becoming stern, "come out here and tell me what's wrong." He was serious now. Fragments of understanding darted in and out of my head. Was it more important to obey my father, or to protect him from this tragic news? I could not figure it out. "Jana!" He raised his voice and gave my arm a firm tug. I slowly unwrapped myself and crawled toward him, emerging soggy and red from beneath the bed.
"Now tell me what's going on."
This must be a cruel joke. Surely if Eric's father knows, my own father must. Fathers were infallible, as far as I could tell, and they shared a common knowledge unknown to little children. Why would my father play such a mean joke on me? "Don't you know?", I asked, turning away to cry.
He just wrapped his arms around me and held me close, rocking me gently. "I can't read your mind," he laughed softly, "you have to tell me what's wrong."
I pushed him away, annoyed and confused. "The world is going to end!"
He huffed, hiding a half-smile. "What?!"
I spied his amusement. He must have known all along, and now he was laughing at me. I pouted flamboyantly.
"Who told you that?"
"Eric did, yesterday." I paused, waiting for an explanation, but he only looked on, so I continued. "He said the world would end today at two."
My father smiled and looked up. How could he smile at a time like this? Didn't he understand the implications of what I was telling him? "Oh honey, Eric's just been teasing you."
"No, his dad told him!" Why wasn't he taking this seriously?
"Well, it's five to two now, so we'll just sit here together and wait, and if two comes and goes and we're still here, we'll know it wasn't true."
I gasped and hugged him tight. Five more minutes and everything would end. This beautiful world that I had only just begun to discover would be torn from me. A vast, impossible nothingness waited coldly on the other side of two o'clock, baited breath blowing hot and sticky over the back of my neck. "What if it's true?" I whispered.
"It isn't true, sweetie."
"How much longer?"
"One minute."
I held my breath. In my mind I pictured my mother, glowing in the afternoon sun. She was smiling and waving at me, wearing a white dress with tiny blue flowers, her hair tumbling down her back in loose curls. She called my name, her face warm and beautiful. She was the most beautiful thing I could imagine. I would never see her again.
"How much longer?"
"Thirty seconds."
I tried to remember what a second felt like. I knew it was less than a minute, but how much less? I wished my mother was in my room with us, wished we could all welcome in the end of everything together. I thought of her, alone somewhere, unaware of the fate that was nearly upon her. How cruel, how awful and unfair.
"There, look." My father held his watch up for me to see. 2:00 blinked black against the gray background.
"But . . . "
"It's two now, and we're still here, and nothing has changed. See, Eric was just teasing you."
"But maybe it will come in another minute." Eric's father couldn't have been wrong about this.
"No, sweetheart, it isn't true. Eric lied to you. Remember how the prayer goes? 'World without end, amen.' Eric was just trying to scare you."
"But . . . why?" My mind danced in a thousand different directions. He was my friend, my best friend. The word 'lie' tumbled around my head, bouncing to and fro. A lie was a sin, and a lie was something you could be punished for. A lie was something that bad people told. You could lie on a bed, and you could also lie on the floor. You could lie down or you could tell a lie, but these were two different things. I understood how to lie down on something, but I couldn't figure out how to tell a lie, or more importantly, why to tell a lie. What was the point of something like that?
"He was just teasing you, because he likes you."
You lie because you like someone? Oh, I thought, I give up. People don't make any sense.