My thoughts grew up when

I started reading from an early age and lived the lives of adults vicariously through novels/stories. I remember even at the age of seven or eight feeling a sense of disconnection from the other kids at school and a certain dissonance between my mind and child body. This caused me to feel, at the time, that I wasn't a child.

In retrospect, of course, I know that I was a child. I can chart, looking back, the stages of development. But that sense that I wasn't a child makes the transition out of childhood hard to pinpoint. This realization crawled down my stomach like a cold, fat eel. It scared me, the sudden awareness that before me stretched out a finite plane of time and whose end would be my end. No escape. And the loneliness of it all.