Parallells

The Beginning

      It all started when I was 9. On a bus ride home from school my friend Doyle and I were playing around in our seat, and I made some kissy face, duck face, whatever you call it. Anyhow, while my lips remained puckered and we were laughing our immature asses off, a kid behind me pushed the back of my head so that my puckered lips went right onto his cheek. I was pissed, and that kid was sure having a laugh. I can remember it insanely vividly, as if it were a dream I had just had and I was running it through my head, trying to find its meaning. That fat, pale face with short, blonde hair and a voice that pierced the air more-so than any creature out of J.R.R. Tolkien’s brilliant mind. And Doyle, his look of disgust and hatred; the look from a friend that pierced down through the soul and out the other end of your body like a blade of steel.

      “What the hell!” Doyle exclaimed with a tone of utter revulsion.

      “Hahaha! You’re gay!” howled Brendan, his baby-face smirking.

      The rest of the kids on the bus seemed to find those words particularly funny at my expense. Being a somewhat intelligent, poor sighted, mutt of a boy who would never go out to hurt someone, no matter what they had done, I was genuinely hurt by these words. As a small boy in a closed-minded small town of CT, I had no exposure to the fact that homosexuals were no different than the rest of us.

      Gay, faggot, homo; all words I would hear for the rest of my school life. The torment seemed to never end. My best friends, they all shunned me as a freak. The ones who didn’t were simply good souls who I had never really talked to before who felt pity towards my plight and would attempt to give me some reconciliation to the fact that I was, in fact, alone. One of them happened to be my crush since 3rd grade, Rebecca. We had always gotten along well, she was pretty, and I deluded myself into thinking that we had “so much in common!” She always ignored my persistent advances, trying to find some excuse to run away or say no. The one time she did actually humor me, I completely forgot and I never went through with my promise.

      Yet for some strange reason, may it be sympathy, friendship or some strange, contorted form of love, she kept on talking to me. She put up with my denial to accept that she never really had feelings for me and would still talk to me. Granted, in a class of approximately eighteen kids, not talking to someone was rather unavoidable.

      My truly best friend since the start of school Jake, though, saw the same qualities in her that I saw. There was one key difference between the two of us, though. I was a scrawny, four-eyed little geek of a kid, while he was muscular, athletic and cooler than I could ever hope to be. He had the same exact plan for her. It became a race between the two of us that would only end in the destruction of our friendship.

      He, of course, had the upper hand to start. He could through a football farther than anyone else in the grade, and he was able to beat me in a dead sprint with ease. Not to mention, he didn’t have hair that resembled the book’s description of Harry Potter, along with glasses to match. He also happened to be surrounded with the very people that I hated with a passion. The word would spread quickly in a school of less than 100 kids that I was supposedly a homosexual, and in the end it would all work in his best interest. Rumors and gossip spread like a wildfire, wiping out anybody who it was pointed at. Harassment was a part of the daily routine. I would get up, get laughed and jeered at on my way to school. I would put up with kids shunning me in class, I would sit alone at lunch, then put up with even more harassment and physical torment during Recess. It was life.

      Meanwhile, without having to worry about a social aspect of my life at all, as well as a ton of free time, my grades soared. I was top in everything in the class. I was valedictorian my fourth-grade year, winning every award there was except for community service, something I couldn’t do due to a parentally set routine. I even went so far as to beat a 6th grader in the school Geography Bee, a class I wouldn’t even take for another two years. I would have beaten him sooner, though, if the judge knew that The Democratic Republic of the Congo was just a fancy way of saying “Zaire”. I was on top of the educational world.

      I also fell into gaming. Video games were probably the best escape from my life that I could have ever gotten. I would play on my Gameboy on a regular basis, two games in which I played to death, learning all the cheat codes, bugs, and playing every single combination of moves and situations in the game. I was unstoppable. I could exploit the weakness of any foe I faced. Their Achilles’ heels were my strongpoints. If only life were that easy. It was an escape, though.

      Something more sinister was churning inside of me, though. Something so horrible and dreadful that it would shape my life for years. I was letting the harassment and constant feeling of hatred around me get inside my head. I began to hate who I was. I was a freak. I was a loser. The loathing continued until I would go as far as to read up on ancient ways of cursing oneself, then preform said curses on myself in the hopes that perhaps my life would somehow be ended in such a way that people would at the very least stop leaving me alone.

      It eventually got the point where I thought about pulling a trigger. I wanted something where my life would simply stop. I could escape the daily torment and abuse and get out of the living hell that was my first-world life. Perhaps everyone would have a better life without me around. I began to ask people I thought I could trust. The few people that I thought would keep their mouths’ shut and let me end my life in peace. They did not approve, and through a network of gossip and rumors, word eventually made it back to adults, who were not pleased to hear of this information. As someone who could lie particularly easily to adults, (primarily because I never had before) I had kept them under the illusion that I was a perfectly happy child living out his life in perpetual happiness. Besides, there were no indicators that anything was wrong with me. I came home happy that my daily hell was over, and my grades were still good, so there was clearly nothing wrong with me.

      My parents had a talk with me, and through a ton of words exchanged, they convinced me to not end my life at the age of 9. That was not the end of a problem, though. The bullying continued until the end of the year, when Brendan left the school for good. I also was assigned a therapist by the school. Of course, I hated this because it meant I would be unable to demonstrate to the class my growing knowledge of how many birds there were in the western half of the state of Connecticut. That was not the only reason I hated it. Psychologists don’t tend to be the most compassionate people. They act as if they are, but you can tell that they are just being paid to do what they do. Human instinct, I guess. The way I’ve figured, psychologists do what they do because they never have had something traumatizing happen in their lives. They are good people for wanting to help, they just can’t. They don’t have the wisdom of someone that has had something awful in their lives. As a result, they are the bane of those of us who had. People like me always try to talk to someone, but there is nobody who can truly relate to what you have gone through or are going through. The tiny little variables involved are just too finite for that to be possible.

      The bullying stopped from him, directly, but the hate and shunning went on. I was unable to participate in certain sports during recess, and when I did, teams would fight over which one got me. Not the good type, but the “I don’t want him on my team” type. That went on for the rest of my time at that school. I was soon to reach a fresh start. It came out of the blue, with a suggestion from my parents that would change the course of my education. I had hoped for it at a younger age, but we were stretched thin for cash, and it was never a priority. Now I needed something new. I toured the school, the interview went well, and I was accepted into the school with a substantial scholarship. A clean slate for me to start anew was 4 months away.

      My grades dropped, but with their dropping slowly came a series of social wins that slowly made me regret not going up to middle school with the rest of the kids I had spent my entire school life with. They began to realize that I was not who they had thought I was just months before. I was happy. They were more open. I could call them all my friends, may they be close or far. I stopped caring about school, and I just relished in the fact that everyone seemed to like me again. Then the end of the year came.