LIFE SUCKS

A look back on my life thus far, and a message to the downtrodden

I have always been laureled with a certain compliment: "You're a smart young man." I at times, am loathe to say that those people were right, I am cursed with raw, unprecedented genius. In elementary school I always was the top of the class. And I was mature for my age as well. Half the time, I related to my teachers better than the other students. I would sit next to them and carry on my conversations with people five times my age, because talking about politics was so much easier than playing tag. Looking back, I was accepted by the rest of the students. When kids are that young, the majority are just too innocent to harbor hate. But I couldn't tell. I could only feel that was that I was different, and I desperately wanted to belong, but I didn't understand them. And so I made my first mistake: I left them alone, to forge within myself a barrier against them, and forget them while I would play by myself.

Life changed. Soon I was in Jr. High, I got a girlfriend. To this day I still feel sorry for her. Her life had been so hard, so much struggle, pain. I wanted to be there for her. I was young, and I thought that somehow I could help carry that weight, to help her shrug it off. I spent almost all my time with her. When her family was evicted, I was there helping them pack their belongings into the sunrise. I helped her with her schoolwork, I wanted her to succeed. Maybe, I thought, if I can help this girl I can redeem myself in other people's eyes, my own eyes. But in the end, my own inability to understand the rest of the human race was my downfall. She left, I was devastated, and my family was thrown into turmoil. You see, gentle reader, I had sacrificed so much of myself to another family, my unstable caretaker slipped off the knife's edge into madness.

From then on, I was not the same. Watching a parent who, despite grievous flaws, you loved turn into a wrathful, violent monster is arsenic to the soul. But to know that your single-parent mother's gnashing and insanity was the work of your hands, you, Frankenstein. I am ashamed to say, that my similarities with Shelly's villan did not end with our creations. I turned my back, and I fled. I ran from my sins. In a twist of fate, I was given a safe place to live. Perhaps I should have thanked God, but I couldn't. I was undeserving of small generosities, even from imaginary beings.

I entered high school that fall. I was afraid. I vomited and retched on my walk to school for the first week, every morning. Highschool, they said, would be the best years of your life. The first two were not mine. My girlfriend, who in my foolishness I had promised my eternal love, was the most popular girl in the school by the end of the first day. She hated me, and that first year I constantly felt. I had once told her about my childhood best friend, and how I had left him behind.

We had been best friends, since the 1st grade. I am not sure how it happened, perhaps he sensed my timidity in that new environment and was compelled to do a good deed by approaching the boy in the corner. Either way, from then on we were inseparable. There were not two better friends in the whole world, we even convinced my family to move into the same block. But I was a fool. As we approached Jr. High, he began to experiment. We had both grown up with a knowledge of alcohol, but he did something I had been told was evil. He smoked marijuana, and he trusted me enough to tell me. The poor boy came to our house some time later, but I was a coward. I could not accept his new hobby, however I also did not have the courage to say so to his face. I left him knocking on the door, until he eventually left. I don't remember if he came back, but either way, I felt nothing. I pushed away the only real friend I had in the world; he wouldn't cross my mind for years. God forgive me for the hurt I caused an innocent child.

But I was not forgiven. Wether through chance, a form of her cruel revenge, or perhaps the first sting of a well earned penance, the girl I had loved and the boy I had shunned were a couple. I was still young, and my ancient concept of love served only to cut through my defenses and wound me.
I had heard of the razor carved lacerations on the hearts of the romantics and the idealists, but the years I spent inside the walls I built against the world as a child had always protected me, detached me to a level where I could always be safe. It is in hindsight now, that I must to laugh at the frailty of my ego to the onslaught of pain resulting from a two month romance. However, my buffer was torn down.

Each day became more and more of a struggle. I was a prisoner, trapped in the corner of the Inferno built to punish my crimes. My mother was stirring a maelstrom, that threatened to swallow me. Her presence was almost daily, portent of what would be my journey to her solution for the problem I represented to her. At night, when I closed my eyes I could see nothing behind my eyelids but a cage. Even then, each morning I wished my dream would come true, as bars or a padded cell often seemed safe opposed to the social world I tried to walk in at school. I felt the stares and the whispers of people. The girl had seen to it that my increasingly embellished story was known; I was the boy who had turned on his family, the boy who was a hypocrite, a coward, and a boy who hits girls. As punishment, I was left alone, just like as a child I had left them all alone.

I spent a whole year this way. There were those who would talk to me, and at times I was grateful for the conversation, but I had begun to break down. The constant expectation to be arrested any minute, or the ever-present tenseness that I walked under at school as I waited for a public display of her hatred. None, like the first ones, came. My Mother's abuse all but vanished, for the first time in many months, I was able to stand straight. For the first time in over a year, I had hope.

I do not know why I wrote this tonight. Perhaps it was therapeutic, and perhaps I want my struggle to be worth something beyond myself. I cannot say that my life continues to be a labor, after that first year and a half I gained a circle of friends, and the next year I gained even more. I still do not fully understand people, but I believe that perhaps I can learn to understand, and perhaps they can learn to heal instead of injure. I realize now, in my senior year as I prepare to graduate, that the dark past is what gives me hope for today. I survived. There were too many days when death was an option that was so much less painful than to simply ride out the storm. Life is not always fair, but justice is always meted out in one form or another. I was able to survive a whole year, fearing for my life, my sanity, and my future. I had no hope, but I can today because I was able to beat more than my situation, but my insecurities and fears, my soul, my misplaced guilt, and my anger that I was a hostage to things beyond my control.

We cannot always predict the road ahead of us, or ever change the path behind us, but there is always a reason for hope. There is always a chance for redemption. There is always a way to survive. I wish I could offer you more than advice, but the truth is, the only person who will be able to see the way out of wherever you are now, is you.