“The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”
-William Faulkner
You are nine and this is the second term of your first year at secondary school. Today is not just any day, it’s a half-day of classes because it’s a sports day and you are excited because you get to wear something other than your uniform and you get to be somewhere other than class. It’s the best of both worlds; all the perks of school without the school part. So you sit with your friends on the grass in clothes you can usually only wear at home, and you are happy. You are happy because this is fun.
Until it isn’t.
Until all your friends start to tell you everything that is wrong with you, intervention style, under the guise of “brutal honesty” and “tough love”. It is a buffet of sugar-coated insults prepared for you and only you; “annoying, “snob”, “weird”, “selfish”, it goes on and on. And you sit silently through it all, you sit there, and you take it all. You know you should say something, you should stand up for yourself or at least toss a few honey-dripping insults of your own. But you don’t, instead you sit and listen wordlessly until it finally ends, and you realise that you’re in pain even though you’re fine, that there are different types of pain. Still without saying anything, you get up and stumble around like a lost person who hasn’t fully accepted that they are lost yet, but it’s starting to set in. You somehow stumble into your sister and even though you can barely stand each other, you love her. You may not like each other, but you love each other and so you tell her. You tell her because you don’t know what to do or who to go to, but you know that she is older and stronger and wiser. She holds you as you cry and tells you how stupid and lame those girls were anyway.
You are 12 and the words of your then “friends” are all too familiar now. You hear them echoed every day. You hear it whispered in the school halls in volumes so loud that you wonder why they even bother whispering. You hear it in the snickers in the girl’s bathroom, wrapped in a veil of secrecy so thin that there might as well not be a veil at all and hushed tones that are barely quiet enough to still be considered hushed. You hear it in the sudden silence that settles on your chatting classmates whenever you sit anywhere near them, and you see it in the looks they begin to trade in replacement of words. You hear it in their snide remarks muttered under their breaths whenever you raise your hand. It is a sound that is constantly on in this place that it is now just background noise for you, like the sound of generators in the neighbourhood when there’s no light. Besides, have you not been through worse? Your things have been stolen and hidden and hours of time lost to searching for them, you have been pushed down a flight of stairs and mocked as you desperately gasped for air after the fall. They were so creative, finding increasingly sadistic and even genuinely dangerous ways of bullying you. Too creative in fact, your parents gave up on you handling it yourself and stepped in. What are words in comparison to that type of innovation?
You are 14 and you only have to endure this hell for one more year. You have lived five years of it and finally freedom is almost within your grasp. It became more liveable over the years, or perhaps you just got used to it. It doesn’t matter which, all that matters is that it became more liveable. You ignore everyone for the most part, their faces turning to blurred outlines of indistinguishable features, their words turning into garbled sounds of voices close enough to be heard but too far away to be understood. You think they do the same.
You are a robot following a program. You are here every day, and you do what you are supposed to without thinking, without really being here. It is so much easier when you don’t have to be really here, when you can be somewhere else. You try not to think about how you’re not even sure where you’ve gone yourself.
You are 15 and you have completed your sentence. It is the last day you will ever be here as a student, hopefully the last day that you’ll ever be here at all. But as you sit there in your fancy dress, you feel nothing. You do not feel happy or sad or some mix of the two, you do not feel anything. You watch them hug each other and laugh and cry and talk about how much they mean to each other and still you feel nothing, neither anger nor fondness nor anything else. You look at your phone and wait for your mother to call and tell you that she’s here so you can go home. And you tell yourself that it’s okay that you feel nothing because it’s finally over now and you can get a fresh start. Things will be different this time, they will be better.
You’re still 15 and this is your first year at university. You sit in the room as your roommate friend’s make one of the cruellest “jokes” that you ever heard at your expense. They have made jokes at your expense before, it’s now a habit of theirs really, but this one is so cruel that you begin to see red. The very thing that brings you and those you love the most so much pain and suffering is turned into a punchline. And you should say something, you should stand up for yourself or at least call them out on their bullshit, but you are nine again and you say nothing. You are nine and you walk away without saying or doing anything, but your sister is too far away for you to go to and so you call her. This time, you both like and love each other so she listens to you as you rant angrily and even as your angry words turn into shaky sobs, she listens. She cannot hold you as you cry, but she tells you that those girls are stupid and lack manners anyway.
You are 17 and this is your third year. University is different, it’s better. Most of the people here are kind or nice enough or at least leaning towards altruism. But you are 12 and you do not dare to hope for more than the peace of being left alone. You hold your breath and wait for the familiar sounds of unkindness around even the people that have showed you no such thing, people that for all you know have no capacity for it, but still you hold your breath and wait. You are 12 and you are also 14 mechanically going through the motions, not really here and not really anywhere else either.
You are 19 and it is the end of the closest that you have ever gotten to falling in love. You would cry if you had any tears left, you would scream or break down or do something, anything, but you are empty. You are not numb, you are empty. You are exhausted from trying to keep a fire burning when it clearly wanted to die. You should have left well enough alone but didn’t, and now here you are. You have poured out everything you had to give even without being asked to, you have put yourself through every high and low and felt all of it so thoroughly and intensely that you cannot feel anymore. You look at the broken pieces of what you thought was the closest thing that you’ve ever had to this type of love, and you finally leave it be. You do not cut your hands on the shards as you desperately try to put it back together, you remind yourself that the cuts you already have will heal, and you walk away. Everyone else had already accepted that it wasn’t worth fixing except you, you are the only person still here trying to. You accept the truth. You pick up your things, turn the lights off, and leave.
You are 20 and this is your graduation. You sit in the amphitheatre and hear familiar names followed by applause and sometimes cheers, and you still feel hollow. You feel hollow because you’re still 15 except this time it hurts. It hurts because you were right, things were different, they were better. But you weren’t, you’re still 15 and empty. Why are you still here?
You start to wonder if you are capable of changing, of growing, of being different. Why are you still nine and silent, 14 and alone, 15 and empty? Why haven’t you grown and moved on like everyone else? Is this all you are, all that you will ever be? Will the years only be new layers of slightly varying shades of the same colour as they pass? Is the weight of this emptiness all that you will ever be able to hold?
You are 21 and you are offered the type of love that your hands have bled for before. The hands holding it out to you are scarred also. They belong to someone who is kind and is someone you would love, but you are 19 and you are too tired. You are too tired even to reach out to hold it, much less offer yours in return. The cuts on your hands have healed, but you are still empty. You are tempted for a moment to take the present nonetheless because you remember how desperately you wanted this once, from different hands but the same thing nonetheless. But you know that you cannot, you can’t do this to someone else. You thank them and say no as politely as you can, but politeness doesn’t feel adequate, so you try honesty. You try to explain to them that you wish things were different, that you wish you were different, but you are still 19 and still 15 and still 14 and still 12 and still nine. They do not understand, but they understand that their gift has been rejected and so they leave.
