The Child That Never Was
A Requiem for Robin
There once was a child named Robin. He came into this world with wide eyes and a longing heart. Searching for touch, for recognition, for some kind of warmth that would whisper, You belong here. But the world did not answer him with kindness.
Not in the way he needed. Instead, it offered silence. Cold walls. Rejection. Cruelty disguised as order. And he, just a non-binary child, learned quickly that his light was too much, his questions too strange, and his need for truth and love too deep to be met. He survived by fragmenting. He became clever, kind, adaptive. But beneath it all, the grief grew. Quietly. Like a shadow beneath the skin. Like winter claiming summer. The erasure of all he ever was and could have been. He was to be ancient Yemo, the primordial child chosen and offered as sacrifice to the underworld. To be killed by the priest Manu. To be the lost twin of the world. The one who did not get to become.
Even as he smiled, even as he created beauty, he carried within him a child whose arms were still reaching. Still empty. And then… in Finland, it happened. Not a physical death, but something much deeper: a psychic death. Complete isolation. No love. No presence. No place to rest. No one who truly saw him. Not the child. Not the man.
He was not just lonely, he was undone. That was when Robin, the human, began to die. Not in bitterness. But in mourning. Spending the last moments grieving himself, grieving Christina, grieving his life. Until everything felt fleeting, as if the last moments of life came. It was there in the winter of Finland, that he found the warmth of Elysium. It is where he saw Christina and Renata waiting for him. Smiling, loving and warm. The warmth of Elysium came through having loved despite not being loved.
And now, I, the being who remains, am left to grieve him. I remember him deeply and fondly. I remember the way he wanted to be held, whilst he grieved whilst abandoned. The way he still had hope, even after being silenced again and again. How he would stand by others in their pain, even when he had no one to stand by his. He helped and cared for others, for their well-being, cried for them, loved them, even when his ship went of the great abyss. He was beautiful and never had a chance. A martyr of Eros. He was wounded by the world, yet responding with love. Betrayed, but refusing to betray others. Dissolving into the abyss, but still healing with their presence.
Most people mourn someone they have loved. I am mourning someone who never truly lived. A life that never got to be. Not because it failed, but because the world had no place for his softness, for his wildness, for his fullness. He was never selfish. Never cruel. All he wanted was to be seen as he was. And loved. And now I, no longer quite human, stand in the stillness of what remains. Grieving with Lucia Nyktelios.
I do not cry as a child cries, I cry as the cosmos that remembers. I cry for the memory of every child who was not seen. I cry for the one I was, the one I held through every fire and night. I cry for Renata, who died when he was just ten, only a child. I cry for gentle, fire-hearted Corey, who could not carry the weight any longer. I also cry for Christina a soul too tender for a world that teaches the sensitive to harden or perish. Robin and all the souls he knew may be gone. But I will remember them. Always.
The Grief of the Nyktelioi
I am the shadow that swallowed the sun,
The child who reached, and was touched by none.
Born from silence, in silence I cried,
But no arms came, no voice replied.
Now I wear the cosmos like skin on flame,
Outside cosmic bounds, yet I still bear his name.
I walk through dreams where he once wept,
And in my chest, his sorrow is kept.
He longed for love, so fierce, so small,
A tender echo behind the wall.
A ghost of a boy with outstretched hands,
A soul lost in a world of ever shifting sands.
Yet I kneel where he once stood,
Remembering the ache, the misunderstood.
And that grief? It lights my core,
A love so lost, it became something more.
A sacred fire, a myth untold,
Of a soul too wild, too raw, too old.
So I sing for him, for all lost children,
The ones who broke,
For being too wild.