*Names changed for privacy reasons.

Personally, I have never been one to heavily engage myself into the prompting Nature vs. Nurture debate that by some means consistently transpires through the grapevine of conversation. This is generally for the reason that it is frankly, a bit high up there on the controversial debates pyramid for my liking. In other words, it’s not in my best interest to fight to the death about something of such mood. This said, it is truth that I have certainly came to a conclusion through fundamental logic and have developed my own impressions that I firmly believe are correct, but being that everyone has there own opinions and reasoning for said opinions, I am not in a position to judge the intricate way somebody elses mind works. Though it seems counterproductive to bring up this note as I have just stated that becoming entangled in this outstandingly contrast sided debate is infantile, their is one substantial point I feel it is compulsory to make public. This is, that children no matter what situation or status, are born as innocent individuals of society. I strive to make this clear for the compact purpose of saying, that at some point in every child’s life, whether it be when they are very young on the scale or older, this faultless safeguard of purity is torn from their minds in the heart of a dominantly corrupting incident. Whether this scenario be something that impinges on the entire world, or on the opposite spectrum, is highly personal and still endangering of one’s prior righteous nature. When this event occurs, that amount of guileless innocence is lost.

In the short story “Alicia”, the protagonist of the piece is a trusting young girl by the name of Christine. She is the narrator of the story, as well as Alicia’s younger sister which puts her in a very burdensome environment as Alicia suffers from an ultimately fatal mental illness. As she recalls the events leading up to her sister’s unfortunate death, we can imagine that Christine is not fully cognisant of what is stumbling through her sister’s in advance of viewing first hand her mental state in the psychiatric ward. This moment in the young girl’s life formalizes what outcome has been assembling itself around her since Alicia’s condition took a turn for the worst, and the crucial part of an innocent eye point of view she has been telling the story from is dissipated as the child finally realizes how horrific things are and what can rise over the best of people in life. Her conclusion is only cradled more so when in the end, Alicia fails to become well again, and is instead is slowly slaughtered by her own brain. As for all children, something dramatic in their lives happens, leaving the ‘innocent eye’ element even outside literature to be diminished in a horrid fashion. For Christine, this is her turning epiphany to a realistic spectacle, but as stated previous, the precise instant is distinctive for all.

When I read this short story, I was immediately brought back to the second in my existence where I too experienced something that seemed so indefinitely immoral and horrid in a little girl’s mind that I from that event onwards I knew that the world was not at all a judicial place. Before I had only assumed out of childish intelligence that most things were indeed undifferentiated to a courtroom. The innocent were left to be, exactly what they should have been, unharmed, and the guilty were punished accordingly to the severity of the crime they had committed. Everything did not lay out like that any longer. There was a somber ‘Aha!’ understanding that passed through my head, and I soon came to grasp that the genuinely existing events I only heard about occurring were immeasurably more material than the story like lands from previous. I withstood a revelation similar to Christine’s in the story, in the sense that it was regarding a death of one of my close and loved family members. Even considering that this was only a short story, the piece enabled me to reconnect with these little tablets of memories, and personally relate them in a time watered down format.

I don’t remember the exact date of the accident, for I was young and when you are young you tend to be much more concerned with being a kid and frolicking in the backyard than concentrating on what the adults around are talking about. I had simply went over to my Grandparent’s house for a visit with my mother and little brother. Without delay, I found my grandmother crying as she stood at the front door to greet us. She told me that my grandfather was upstairs in his room, in reply to my curious but big mouthed questioning on where he had vanished too. In result, this ‘visit’ consisted of me wandering aimlessly around the living room interrogating whoever seemed to appear from whatever doorway on what was going on. I was just a nuisance really, underfoot of what important grown up matters needed to be discussed in those long painstaking minutes, so I was left wondering for a bit longer. My brother was very young, perhaps three, going through a hot-wheels stage and in his childlike wisdom, disregarding the emotions in the house as something to be blocked out of his potential play time. He most certainly would not comprehend anything that would be told to him though he was able to sense that something bad had happened. This was proved as my grandmother finally came and sat down with me, explaining what had occurred only an hour earlier, I’d imagine ricocheting over details as she went for car accidents are never the things you want to visualize in the utmost detail. Despite children being innocently born, it is still in our human nature to be inexplicably aware of when something has gone staggeringly amiss for we observe the distortions in how our relavites are acting. When you know somebody’s usual persona, it is easy to distinguish those sudden disconcerting differences.

It started with “There’s been an accident,” and ended with “But don’t worry Amber.” I found this almost ironic to say aloud. How could they expect me to not worry after being told something so turbulently disturbing? *Sasha’s car’s brakes had failed while she was driving down a hill in the strikingly remote wilderness that was the Nicaraguan jungle. Her car had hit something when she couldn’t stop, a tree I’d assume, and thrown her flying out the side window of the vehicle, slamming her down into the ground so hard it caused her to fall into a nearly instant coma. My *Sasha, this had happened to my beloved *Sasha only hours beforehand, and she was only just reaching a hospital and some sign of civilization now. Already having been determined as in terminal condition. Then, as the days progressed after this news her parents were facing a decision that no family member should ever have to make in their lives. She was living off life support, but nothing else. Her brain and memory in their entirety were dead, and I was told by an increasingly unstable mother of mine that if she was ever to wake up out of the coma she would undoubtedly be a different person. Disabled to an extent where you’d prefer the person to be dead than alive in such a state of helplessness and torture.

Her parents, I cannot fathom what they must have felt, but they decided what needed to be done. At the word of the legal guardians when one is in that plight the hospital pulled the plugs on the machines, and she was dead. Just like that, with no hope of ever returning to the living world. “Whether a person has died on the day of his death-or long before” as *Sasha did, those series of events were the leading crucial moment in my lifetime that mentally made me incapable of believing the innocence in any situation is authentic. If the most compassionate, beautiful, intelligent, patient and positive representative big sister I had ever, and ever would have was just murdered within moments for no apparent reason, what the hell was wrong with the world? This question still sometimes bothers me to this day, though now I have come to the conclusion that it is simply the way things work. It’s depressingly unfortunate.

Nothing is judicious, but it’s stories like Alicia that cause you to think and hope that somehow along the line it will turn out that way.