I didn’t know Will could draw, I remember thinking as my friend’s hand quickly moved across the page. And then I looked more closely at Will’s impromptu sketch, and I immediately regretted it. I tried to unsee it. I shifted my attention to other things around me, anything at all that wasn’t ink on the page: the blur of Will’s hand, the beads of sweat gathering at his temples, the gentle autumn breeze creeping through the crack of the window.
Don’t look at the page. Just don’t look at it.
But I knew I had to. So I looked. And it was worse than I expected. Much worse.
That’s how you’re meant to start these things right? I have never kept a journal before, nor do I want to, but the hospital said I have to as part of my ‘treatment plan’. Funny.
Let me back track a little.
I have always been overweight, from being a child. I went to a strict Christian school, and luckily because of this I was never bullied because of my size- but you always notice the other kids staring.
When I was young, I had the worst luck making friends. Not for the regular reasons—I wasn’t much different than the other kids in my neighborhood, and I wasn’t too weird, or at least I wasn’t back then. No, I was actually pretty normal, until that one Halloween night when my luck changed.
For my costume that year, I wore a box wrapped in tinfoil. There were blinking lights and buttons glued on the front, and I’d cut two holes for my arms, which were covered in those flexible dryer vent hoses. With a metal colander strapped on my head and a plastic laser gun, I was a serious robot death machine. Humans beware.
“Bobby! Pay attention!” he heard his teacher say. He snapped out of his reverie and looked up to see her glaring at him. “Did you hear anything I’ve been saying?” she continued.
Bobby shrugged his shoulders. Prior to being disrupted, he was daydreaming that he could freeze time, and before that he was imagining himself navigating the classroom if he was only 5 inches tall.
When the whistle blew, I punched my time card and drove home bleary-eyed after a long shift unloading cargo at the docks.
But there was no greeting at the door, no dinner waiting on the counter. My daughter, Chelsea, usually home by four, was nowhere to be found. No note left behind, car keys still dangling on the hook. I called her cell phone, got no answer.
My grandfather died two weeks ago. After the funeral, my family sat around my grandmother’s living room, talking about the nice memories we had with him. All of us grandchildren mentioned how he always spoke in different voices when reading, even if it was just the newspaper. We spoke of the stories he used to tell us about his childhood.
5th March 2016
Notes: 11
Reblogged From softwaluigi
