Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night

My soul was crushed by the weight of the world late in the spring of 1993. I was fifteen. I stil consider the age of fifteen to fall within the limits of my childhood simply because at that age, you can't do jack.

In school, I had always been the fat kid. The smart kid. the clumsy, non-athletic kid who was always picked last in gym class. The kind of kid who could never understand why the other kids were so mean.

I smiled a lot. I told a lot of jokes. I read a lot of books and escaped into new worlds created by words. I hid in a dream world that shielded me for the harshness of reality. The problem is, you can not hide in dreams forever.

At the age of fifteen, I thought I was in love. I was in love, as much as a fifteen year old can be in love. I was in love with my long time childhood friend. Her name was Julie.

Julie and I had attended Sunday school together whe we were younger, and starting in the forth grade, we went to school together. As we grew older, Julie became a beautiful young woman and began moving in some fo the more popular social circles. I, on the other hand, remained a fat, dream-dwelling nerd. Over the course of those many years, I never told Julie how I felt about her. I really never had to. She knew; everyone knew. However, through it all, Julie and I remained friends.

In the spring of 1993, the end of my sopmore year of highschool, I lost my mind. that can be considered a perfectly reasonable response to having your soul crushed. Every spring the concert band would take a trip to some tourist trap or another to compete in a band festival. That spring found us in San Antonio, Texas. I was invisable on that trip, or at least I was to Julie's eyes. Maybe the growing gap between our social status had grown too great. Maybe she was too caught up in her latest boyfriend to remember to pay any attention to her oldest friend. I do not know, or maybe I just cannot remember. High school kids can be unbelieveably cruel; maybe some pain is not ment to be remembered.

That year, I learned of the soothing, hot pain of the knife. I still wear that scar of self-inflicted mutilation on my right forearm. It is a constent reminder of the events that caused all of my supressed anger, rage, self-loathing, and fear to slowly accend from the depths of my unconcious, painting my view of the world with the colors of cynisism, doubt, and distrust. You can see that I still bare these emotional scars nine years later. You can see their physical manifestations in the scowl lines that crease my brow. You can watch them in the way I carry myself as if to say to others, "Stay away. I am not to be triffled with." It is why I wear spikes. It is why I glare at strangers. I do not not like you. I do not trust you.

This may not be my fondest childhood memory, but it is certainly the most prominent. These events signifigantly changed the path of my life from that point on. It was the last day of my worldly inocence.