The Child without a Childhood

She lived through every age. She never aged too fast, skipped a year of her life, or went through some time machine to ruin her aging cycle. Yet, she never had a childhood. Although there is no definite age span for a childhood, she never even started. She was too busy trying to learn how to breathe, and eventually the years just passed her by. Her body was funny that way, not knowing how to breathe. Not that she needed to have an oxygen tank trailing her at all times and a tube up her nose like the one her grandma had, but her mind simply just never told her that she needed to inhale and then exhale. Her mind was off doing other activities, every other activity other than breathing, in fact. She would spend her time worrying about what was to come next and worrying about where she needed to be and who she would become. And eventually she would choke, gasping for air. Through all this pondering it never occurred to her to breathe, until her body was screaming for the sweet air to fill her once again. And then a few repetitions of the inhaling and exhaling would occur, but eventually the cycle repeated. For as long as she'd known, she'd lived in this constant state of planning and worrying. She called it dreaming about her future quite often, but she knew her dream had never been to have an insufficient respiratory system. That label was simply an excuse, just to dismiss the routine and pretend that it was okay. And then one day, she felt as though her lungs had shriveled up. She went to take one of her few deep breaths, and she'd realized she no longer had the lung capacity for those rarities, she'd tormented her body for too long and had now developed the inability to ever take the same breath as she could when she was younger. Younger? At one time, she was younger than now. But when? The time all seemed to be a blur when she constantly had two reminders in her brain at all times: 1. Inhale, exhale. 2. Everything else. She didn't remember that time period, the one that happened before the present. At one time, she was younger, but that didn't make a difference. She'd always been conditioned to think and consider this way. She was older now, but she had not become wiser in any methods of helping her own body. During this whole process of forgetting and relearning how to breathe, she'd missed her childhood. She didn't play with friends when she had the opportunity. Instead, she dismissed them with an occasional, "sorry, I need to remember how to breathe today," but more often a traditional, "sorry, I need to hold my breath today." She didn't dance in the mirror or nap in the sun at the frequency she was created to. And now she is 16. She doesn't know how to breathe until she is manually reminded. Her brain cannot do the simple function on it's own. This shows she cannot handle the most basic multitasking, yet she forces herself to do more complex forms nearly every second of the day. However, she can never multitask living in the present and remembering the past at the same time, there isn't a past to be remembered or a present to live in when she can only think of the future. She plans a lot for her future, but she can't find a place to include breathing.