Once I Was a Little Boy: A Story of Paranoia

“You still haven’t told me, where all these scars and marks, on your body, comes from. We’ve been seeing each other for almost a month now.” She says, while she’s slowly sliding her fingers down the big scar on my stomach. “Why don’t you want to tell me what happened?” She says after a minute of silence. “Fine, if you want to know what happened so bad, I´ll tell you.” She’s smiling satisfied.

“When I was a little boy, I lived in a big house in the suburbs with my parents. We were a wealthy, happy little family. We had a cat and a dog, that I loved very much. We even had a swimming pool, but my parents had put fence around it, so I couldn’t fall in and drown, when I was playing around in the yard. We also had a housemaid and a gardener, but I don’t remember them very well.

I clearly remember this sign we had hanging on our gate, saying “YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED” with giant letters, and under the text there was a shadow of a person, who looked very scary to me. My parents were obsessed with getting all kinds of security systems and protection for our house. At first, I didn’t really understand why, but later I learned about these bad people, of another color, living outside the city. I kept hearing so many bad things about these people. They were breaking into people’s houses, good people's houses, from our neighborhood.