(no subject)
A bit of writing from my high school years. It gets better the more you read.
Trying to put this behind a cut, let's see how much my internet skills fail.
You Would Too
If you were him,you would cry too. You would stare in the mirror, a wane, sickly face with eyes too old staring back. At only twelve, you would have faced rejection from the human race. You would glare at your own visage, the cause of your pain. Humiliation and insults that seem incomprehensible at such a young age by those older and severely inexperienced in such a lifestyle would be commonplace to you.
A debilitating disease. Your kind is only praised on television specials, and then, you are not commended for your talents, or your endeavors, only that you have suffered the slings and arrows of a crass society and lived to talk about it. You are touted for your strength, but ignored for your true beauty.
If he sat down near you, you would stare too. You would look at your girl friends, grimace, stick out your tongue and giggle. You would titter frantically and look away, shifting in your seat in childish amusement. He would stiffen his neck, and the snickers would sing high in the air while his ears burned with degradation.
A family-rending situation. The difficulty involved in relating to someone with a skin disease, a physical indiscretion of God, creates a forced state of celibacy. Only the most unyielding love can touch you. Your strength is your family. There is no one else.
If you had Ms. Miller's fifth grade class, you'd groan too. Guilt gnaws on the edge of your conscience, but the pressure of amiable gossip is overpowering. You would chatter on the swings about the smell, th look, the sound.
“Gross.”
“Grody.”
“Nasty.”
The words change with the seasons, the generations, but the deeper impact is the same, and irreversible.
If you were Ms. Miller, you would struggle too. Faced with a room of children raised into a biased, variance-condemning community, which you yourself was a part of and still serves, you would struggle to find a balance between ignoring the taunts thrown into the boy's face and stating his irregularity aloud to dissuade the antagonizing mass of prepubescent representations of society.
It's true. You bring your children up with the belief that you are creating dispassionate, impartial, helpful, happy citizens of the incredible all-embracing US of A, and each day that they are exposed to someone other than you, the loving, doting parent, they are brainwashed into oblivion by Nature's caste system of humanity. Years, even decades will pass before this is scrubbed clean from their system by their own personal morals and the encouragement of those having run along that road before. Unfortunately for many, this cleansing process may never occur. They will suffer through life in the faint agony that they are missing something essential. It is the respect of their peers.
You, his parents, you would love him too. You would face opposition,and comfort him nightly. You would spend years of your life strengthening his defenses, preparing him for the hostility you knew he would face.
He sees no smiles, no joy. He is in a dark world. Faces turn from him in perpetual unconscious discrimination. He is not seen as uncommon, or unique. He term for him is “different”. And that is the kindest term your would offer.
There are the few. Those who have broken away from the chain, free radicals of society who act without the discretion of appearance or sensory perception. Those shining beacons, so far and few between, are often either similarly downtrodden in society, or completely devoid of it. They do not suffer the delusions that seem to infect so many others.
If you passed him in the street, you, who knows him least, the stranger, the foreigner in his world, you too would rummage faux-frantically in your bag, a convincing distraction to avoid looking into his eyes. You do not even know what affliction he has, only that is would be unseemly to relate to him. You would not see his pain, his abject sadness, as you averted your eyes from his collectively perceived “disfigurement” in accordance with your agreement in a strict social contract. In order to avoid your own humiliation, his would be shunned aside as something that was not your problem, that never was your problem. You, the socially accepted norm. Don't lie. You would too