Innocents

We were such innocents. The world, for us, held nothing but schoolwork, play, and the occasional spat with mom or dad.
And then the changes came. We no longer trusted, no longer believed, and no longer felt truly safe.
We had begun to ask, "Why?"
Schoolwork was either evaluated in the light of our future hoped-for careers, or carelessly dumped. Playtime became full of duplicitous motives - and play for the sake of play abandoned as childish. Every argument became a life-or-death battle for truth, justice, and that little thing called personal pride. We entered into the politics of our people, the detective work of our own design, everything analyzed for some hidden motive.
We second-guessed one another, third-guessed, fourth-guessed ourselves into breakups and divorces, battles and wars.
Idealism crashed and raged against the cliffs of reality, and broke upon the shores of various non-realities and secondary half-realities. And although emotion, everyone claimed, had been left on the roadside, replaced by logic, logic was in fact out to lunch, and emotion manned the counter against its return. No one really noticed the difference, anyway.
And no one remembered what a soul looked like, because no one saw anyone else's, and most doubted that they had even existed in the first place.