• Thoughts from then that I still remember are abstract shapes. I don’t recall their exact scientific contents (if thoughts are purely scientific to begin with, which is debatable). Their faces are like a collective blur, sifting and stirring like unknown ingredients in a pool of confusion and hurt. The events from that early time can come to me again, though slowly. They seem to blend and converge with other equally traumatic memories that were scattered throughout my troubled childhood and well into my just as troubled adolescence.

    That day I sat alone (as usual) outside my comfort zone called the classroom. My eternal protector the teacher encouraged me to leave the sanctuary, thought somehow that it would help; however, leaving me to the mercy of the merciless (also: peers) was cruelty in my eyes. Time drew out indefinitely. Recess was supposed to be only half an hour, but it went on for weeks longer. I asked a nearby authority figure (also: parent volunteer with a shiny whistle), but didn’t receive an answer as to why I had been in school for seven days straight.

    An indeterminable amount of time passed, after which I was approached by a being. (By what sort I don’t remember.) And with three breaths filled with little lines of speech from the currently phantom face and existence in front of me, I heard my brain kick into overdrive. My distress at being betrayed by my mentor left in one big gust of manic glee.

    This wind carried me away to the play structure, deposited me where fun was designated to grow (also: teeter-totter) and started me off on an adventure. Though it ended all too soon when we were herded back into the previously hailed promised land that I didn’t care for anymore. I resented time for working against me.

    I always picked up little conversation when the other students walked into class, among them instead of away from them I heard more than I ever had. I heard angrily screeched arguments, jovially sung tunes that held no meaning except fear at their dangerous catchiness, and I heard one statement louder than all of this.

    In the larger scope it was small. Whispered, not yelled. Several words instead of an infinite span of meter and poetry. But it felt like even the universe stopped and coughed nervously at the statement from the being before that stood contrary to the statement I had been told.

    I fled to the nurse’s office, and was sent home soon after for a ‘very bad stomach ache’ (also: faking it). Once there I told myself to be careful for a while. I told myself that it was okay to be untrusting just now. “Just now” turned into days, weeks, years. I admitted once that “just now” was a ridiculous fallacy made only to make myself feel better, but I haven’t yet seen anything to regain my trust in the savages around me.