- Feb 3, 2024
- LitBits
- 0
New blog post by Jason L. – discussions in this thread, please
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I am glad you’re still here. Come, sit down with me.
We’re in my English class. Spring 1994 is the pre-Axe-Body Spray era, if you’re wondering why you’re not identifying it. I like English class, in general. When I was 14, I was awarded a prize for a short story, and Mrs. Williams has read some of my short stories and laughed out loud at their humor. I wrote a really good fairy tale about a Russian Jewish girl who marries an aristocrat that year.
I should, however, note that I am not the same as I was in the Christmas of 1992. I have retreated into the persona of class clown. I wisecrack, and if I don’t do that, I am asking questions. If not, that, I am steadily plotting a story. I can’t tell you which one. There are so many. I take little sheets of paper and tear them into precise squares for plot and character and rearrange them on the desk before me and let my imagination go wild.
There I am, in the far right-hand corner seat in the front row. It is an accident of the roster that I was assigned this seat, but I like it. Today, Mrs. Williams has assigned an essay: “The weirdest person I know.”
I think about my great-uncle Marty, who still unabashedly wears bell bottoms (with flames at the bottom, no less) to do his grocery shopping, gets his hair permed, and loves opera. He’ll do. He is an odd duck. I don’t have much time to think this through, because it’s timed. I write out my little essay and you can tell how pleased I am with it. I’m even smiling a bit.
What happens next is why we’re here. Be patient. Mrs. Williams is going to ask us to pass the papers to the front and to the side. So in other words, they are all going to the front row, and then each one goes to the person to their left. I’m in that far left corner, so it all goes to me. She’ll pick it up.
I glance down and realize, to my shock, that other people have not written about eccentric relatives. They’re written about me. A boy I’ve known since the second grade says that he wishes he could use me for his private punching bag. People comment on how I sit like a girl, how I’m probably gay. A quiet girl I had no idea hated me says I make her sick and he hopes I’ll go to Hell. I stare at these words.
And then, Mrs. Williams asks for three people to come up and read their essays. All three are about me, with the caution that they cannot use any names. I sit, stony-faced through it. I can feel them staring and snickering at me. Every second that ticks by thunders in my ears. I am aware of that sense of being peculiarly present.
The bell rings and I go to Janet Green, the student counsellor. I am trying to keep myself under control as I tell her what has just happened. She looks at me with mild aggravation. “Well, what did you expect?” she asks.
I never go to see her again.
I walk through the empty halls, and every molecule of air feels like sandpaper against my skin. People talk about feeling raw after trauma, but this is different. This is actual sensation, as if every layer of protection I’ve built up has been stripped away, leaving exposed nerve endings in agony. Each breath of air, the weight of light on my skin makes the muscles and tendons beneath my skin rebel, as if they are trying to ball up and shrink away. My body knows something my mind hasn’t fully processed yet: I have been flayed alive in that classroom, and there is nowhere safe to retreat while my skin grows back.
I know. I know. You’re appalled. I can see it in your face. You want to console me, but that’s not why we’re here. Please. Just wait. I know you have questions. Why did the adults facilitate this? Okay, well, much as I love you, you forget how teenagers swing between the vulnerable and the unlovable so quickly. And it is not their job to love us. In fact, it is not really their job to nurture us, contrary to popular belief. It is their job to get us to limp through standardized testing. That’s it. Everything else, everything that distracts, needs to be brought in hand. Mrs. Williams, likely frustrated, made a decision. And my day of reckoning came in the same way most of them do: brutal, precise, unexpected. Perhaps I should be grateful that it came in this way rather than in another, less controlled way. I can wonder that today, from such a distance. But there is a limit. I can give grace to these adults, but not gratitude.
Fourth period has started, but I don’t go to class. I instead walk through the empty halls to the darkened auditorium. The blood in my veins sings to me, begging for release. I feel it. I know instinctively how I want to cut and where. Two long, clean incisions down, not across, the upper forearm. I don’t have anything to do it with.
I don’t do it. Don’t worry. I don’t even cry, because they’ll be looking for my puffy face and red-rimmed eyes. I sit in silence with my pain, spending lunch and the entire class period in silence in that darkened room. In fifth period, I’m back to normal. The next day, I come back to class with a new essay written, and I ask Mrs. Williams to read it. She says yes. I’ve changed it. I am no longer interested in the peccadillos of my aged relative. Instead, I start with the lines, The weirdest person I know is me. I ask the class what harm I have done to them by my existence and challenge them to create tolerance. Mrs. Williams stops me mid-sentence. “You’re attacking the class.”
“But they attacked me!”
“There were no names.”
I storm out of the class. It’s the only time I’ll ever do it in my life.
You know, here’s the thing. I wasn’t sure myself yet that I was gay. In fact, had other people not been so insistent on it, and equally vocal that it placed me at the bottom of the social ladder, I might have come to grips with it sooner. But the truth is that I would have sold my soul not to be at that time. There was nothing good or kind that I could see on m future. And what I hated the most, when I was honest with myself, was that other people took that away from me—the chance to figure myself out and come to terms in my own time. And that I had to say that all of those horrible people were right. It was as if coming out, even to myself, was letting my abusers win. Of all the lies we tell, the ones we tell to ourselves are the most harmful.
In sixth period, a week or two later, Mrs. Britt asks if people would like to move around their seats. The two people on either side of me are the only people that raise their hands. It doesn’t matter that I’ve stopped making jokes, that I have learnt my lesson, that I have made myself smaller and quieter. No amount of good behavior can protect me. Mrs. Britt looks pained, because she genuinely likes me, but, as someone else mutters, he brings it on himself. I don’t know who. I don’t let my gaze leave the textbook. I’m fairly certain, now that I’m thinking on it, that Mrs. Britt said a name sharply, but it doesn’t register. I am alone with the silence. There’s always next year, and the year after.
Just a little bit more. Can you stay with me?
---
Get the discussion going – post your thoughts & comments in the thread below…
For more posts by Jason L. click here Grace Notes, Part 2 – Litopia
---
I am glad you’re still here. Come, sit down with me.
We’re in my English class. Spring 1994 is the pre-Axe-Body Spray era, if you’re wondering why you’re not identifying it. I like English class, in general. When I was 14, I was awarded a prize for a short story, and Mrs. Williams has read some of my short stories and laughed out loud at their humor. I wrote a really good fairy tale about a Russian Jewish girl who marries an aristocrat that year.
I should, however, note that I am not the same as I was in the Christmas of 1992. I have retreated into the persona of class clown. I wisecrack, and if I don’t do that, I am asking questions. If not, that, I am steadily plotting a story. I can’t tell you which one. There are so many. I take little sheets of paper and tear them into precise squares for plot and character and rearrange them on the desk before me and let my imagination go wild.
There I am, in the far right-hand corner seat in the front row. It is an accident of the roster that I was assigned this seat, but I like it. Today, Mrs. Williams has assigned an essay: “The weirdest person I know.”
I think about my great-uncle Marty, who still unabashedly wears bell bottoms (with flames at the bottom, no less) to do his grocery shopping, gets his hair permed, and loves opera. He’ll do. He is an odd duck. I don’t have much time to think this through, because it’s timed. I write out my little essay and you can tell how pleased I am with it. I’m even smiling a bit.
What happens next is why we’re here. Be patient. Mrs. Williams is going to ask us to pass the papers to the front and to the side. So in other words, they are all going to the front row, and then each one goes to the person to their left. I’m in that far left corner, so it all goes to me. She’ll pick it up.
I glance down and realize, to my shock, that other people have not written about eccentric relatives. They’re written about me. A boy I’ve known since the second grade says that he wishes he could use me for his private punching bag. People comment on how I sit like a girl, how I’m probably gay. A quiet girl I had no idea hated me says I make her sick and he hopes I’ll go to Hell. I stare at these words.
And then, Mrs. Williams asks for three people to come up and read their essays. All three are about me, with the caution that they cannot use any names. I sit, stony-faced through it. I can feel them staring and snickering at me. Every second that ticks by thunders in my ears. I am aware of that sense of being peculiarly present.
The bell rings and I go to Janet Green, the student counsellor. I am trying to keep myself under control as I tell her what has just happened. She looks at me with mild aggravation. “Well, what did you expect?” she asks.
I never go to see her again.
I walk through the empty halls, and every molecule of air feels like sandpaper against my skin. People talk about feeling raw after trauma, but this is different. This is actual sensation, as if every layer of protection I’ve built up has been stripped away, leaving exposed nerve endings in agony. Each breath of air, the weight of light on my skin makes the muscles and tendons beneath my skin rebel, as if they are trying to ball up and shrink away. My body knows something my mind hasn’t fully processed yet: I have been flayed alive in that classroom, and there is nowhere safe to retreat while my skin grows back.
I know. I know. You’re appalled. I can see it in your face. You want to console me, but that’s not why we’re here. Please. Just wait. I know you have questions. Why did the adults facilitate this? Okay, well, much as I love you, you forget how teenagers swing between the vulnerable and the unlovable so quickly. And it is not their job to love us. In fact, it is not really their job to nurture us, contrary to popular belief. It is their job to get us to limp through standardized testing. That’s it. Everything else, everything that distracts, needs to be brought in hand. Mrs. Williams, likely frustrated, made a decision. And my day of reckoning came in the same way most of them do: brutal, precise, unexpected. Perhaps I should be grateful that it came in this way rather than in another, less controlled way. I can wonder that today, from such a distance. But there is a limit. I can give grace to these adults, but not gratitude.
Fourth period has started, but I don’t go to class. I instead walk through the empty halls to the darkened auditorium. The blood in my veins sings to me, begging for release. I feel it. I know instinctively how I want to cut and where. Two long, clean incisions down, not across, the upper forearm. I don’t have anything to do it with.
I don’t do it. Don’t worry. I don’t even cry, because they’ll be looking for my puffy face and red-rimmed eyes. I sit in silence with my pain, spending lunch and the entire class period in silence in that darkened room. In fifth period, I’m back to normal. The next day, I come back to class with a new essay written, and I ask Mrs. Williams to read it. She says yes. I’ve changed it. I am no longer interested in the peccadillos of my aged relative. Instead, I start with the lines, The weirdest person I know is me. I ask the class what harm I have done to them by my existence and challenge them to create tolerance. Mrs. Williams stops me mid-sentence. “You’re attacking the class.”
“But they attacked me!”
“There were no names.”
I storm out of the class. It’s the only time I’ll ever do it in my life.
You know, here’s the thing. I wasn’t sure myself yet that I was gay. In fact, had other people not been so insistent on it, and equally vocal that it placed me at the bottom of the social ladder, I might have come to grips with it sooner. But the truth is that I would have sold my soul not to be at that time. There was nothing good or kind that I could see on m future. And what I hated the most, when I was honest with myself, was that other people took that away from me—the chance to figure myself out and come to terms in my own time. And that I had to say that all of those horrible people were right. It was as if coming out, even to myself, was letting my abusers win. Of all the lies we tell, the ones we tell to ourselves are the most harmful.
In sixth period, a week or two later, Mrs. Britt asks if people would like to move around their seats. The two people on either side of me are the only people that raise their hands. It doesn’t matter that I’ve stopped making jokes, that I have learnt my lesson, that I have made myself smaller and quieter. No amount of good behavior can protect me. Mrs. Britt looks pained, because she genuinely likes me, but, as someone else mutters, he brings it on himself. I don’t know who. I don’t let my gaze leave the textbook. I’m fairly certain, now that I’m thinking on it, that Mrs. Britt said a name sharply, but it doesn’t register. I am alone with the silence. There’s always next year, and the year after.
Just a little bit more. Can you stay with me?
---
Get the discussion going – post your thoughts & comments in the thread below…
For more posts by Jason L. click here Grace Notes, Part 2 – Litopia
