It was hard, trying to be a kid. Much harder than anything else could imagine.
Almost as hard as back in the day, when people drove a horse and a wagon.
All she wanted to do was play. No one even noticed or glanced her way, or so she thought.
The day was always long and dragged on. Her heart became a stone that others walked on.
Neither naive nor stupid, she was in between. That is because her life was not as it seemed.
Becoming a little lady, she still longed to be a child, young and pretentious. Nothing to keep her attention, except her imagination and dreams, which made her seem more and suspicious.
Guilty almost just because she breathed. No one even cared about her enough to believe.
Something wasn’t right with her, something a miss. Someone in her house was guilty of this.
Alone yet she lived as one of four behind that yellow front door. So much went on there, so much more.
It was hard, hard to live there. So hard to smile, so much to bear.
Much more than anyone imagined. That’s just how it was.
Count on the English language’s Latin lexical options to pretty up the unpleasant. You can have an entire conversation about lice and avoid the l-word entirely using pediculous and its relatives. None of the words (from pediculus, meaning “louse”) is remotely common, but they’re all available to you should you feel the need for them. There’s pediculosis, meaning “infestation with lice,” pedicular, “of or relating to lice,” and pediculoid, “resembling or related to the common lice.” Pediculid names a particular kind of louse—one of the family Pediculidae. And if you’d like to put an end to all of this you might require a pediculicide—defined as “an agent for destroying lice.”
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Examples
All of the campers in the cabin had to be checked for lice when one boy’s sleeping bag was discovered to be pediculous.
“They say pediculoushumors and fly borne air are culprits of plague, so the townsmen make a pyre of flowers and brush, attar and spikenard, by way of purging the air of offense.” — Fiona Maazel, Last Last Chance, 2008
Mws R Writings 