Childhood

The hard desk. There I sat. The new kid in school. I wasn’t sure if my discomfort was from the unforgiving chair or the sideways glances I catch the other kids giving me. I can barely remember third grade. But that day was the first day I truly felt the and emptiness I would carry with me through school and in to adult hood. I felt it like the suitcase I had to struggle to pull when we suddenly left our house late at night. Or was it early in the morning? All I remember is being pulled from a slumber, the sand of sleep still heavy in my eyes. And lights. No. Cop car lights. We were being rushed to the car. I remember the police officer saying they were changing the locks and we were not allowed back. We had had ten days. But why can’t I get all of my toys? Those next few days were a blur. A mess of hotel rooms, staying with friends of ours and yelling. So much yelling. My dad never did anything right and I think I can hear him crying? I just want to go home. So we drive. I didn’t know I fell asleep but when I wake, I hear the ocean and I’m all alone in the car. They left me! Did the police take them too? Tears threatened the brims off my eyelids as the panic started to build in my chest. I had to build the courage to set myself up right and peer out the window . . . frantic. . .

Then I snap back to the present; the new classroom and uncomfortable chair. I can hear the kids snickering. I didn’t realize the teacher asked me something. When I finally looked at her, she must have seen the tears from my memories threatening to spill down my cheeks. She smiled sympathetically, cleared her throat of the pity burning there and changed the subject, whatever it happened to be. I think she feared to make the new girl cry on her first day. Absentmindedly I doodled on the desk then erased it. Doodled and erased. Doodled. Erased. I felt content. I even relaxed a little. I continued my pattern until a clearing of a throat over my shoulder startled me. I looked up, absentmindedly. Right as I was in the erase phase. The eyes full of sympathy were now full of something else. Like anger. But why? The preppy blond girl next to me looked smug. She told the teacher I wrote on the desk. And now I’m in trouble on my first day?? In a few years, I would stick up for the preppy, popular blonde sitting next to me. She would eventually get bullied and the smugness would turn in to a suitcase of emptiness that she would struggle to pull by herself. But I remember. I remember my first day, of my fourth school, for my third grade elementary class. And I remember the weight of that loneliness and the look of her eyes that threatened to spill tears.