Fourth grade was the year everything changed. In this year, I was almost placid thoroughly, and owed someone for that. It seemed as if I went from being the frugal child I once was, to a follower to a plain weirdo who sat alone at recess. I was supplant to the world and it seemed no cared except my mom. In the third grade I had thrown a giant hissy fit for a substitute teacher. Not knowing what to do with me, she placed me out in the hall where I cried until I felt I couldn’t cry anymore. A teacher whose class was in the computer lab found me in the quad, her name was Mrs. Green. She took me gently to her room, shared some of her chocolate muffin with me, allowed me to help her write the day’s lesson plan on the white board and then returned me to my sub where I was perfectly complacent until the next year. Mrs. Green taught fourth grade and she became my teacher.
Being the very observant person she is, she noticed my struggle for words and grasping things. She brought this up to my mom who had already known about the problems. I sat unaware of what they were talking about in the corner reading. That following weekend we went to my grandparent’s house where the world was always hard to grasp for me. It didn’t matter where we were but I just didn’t get things easily. After one particularly hard evening, I was eavesdropping on my mom and grandparents in the down stairs living room. I heard her say; she has a learning disability and she’ll need to be placed in special education classes, away from all the other kids. I didn’t understand what the words meant at the time but my mom was crying and they were talking about me.
I soon came to realize that these words meant I was slightly mentally handicap with a learning disability. I was placed in special education classes away from all the other children. I spent hours at a time going over parts of speech and simple multiplication problems for second graders while the rest of my fourth grade class zoomed along. This was also the year my personality disorder began to surface and I was forced to take pills to drown out my internal voice. I felt sleepy and sluggish and eventually I needed a bolster within my own head. I stopped taking the medication but it didn’t stop the teasing and laughing. It didn’t stop the name calling or rumors. And it certainly didn’t help me get friends.
I was completely alone. No one cared about me. No one understood my struggles. No one accepted me. And I would soon come to realize that all I wanted was acceptance. I had felt this acceptance that same year when I joined group therapy and met a girl named Kammy. Our attraction was immediate, we were both quietly broken and knew that together we could withstand whatever was thrown at us. We wanted no one to know about our tryst and so we were never caught together in public or alone. The year of her departure was the year of her reveal. Kammy being three years my senior and fifteen when I was twelve announced she was gay. Kam told me she liked women- and she loved me. I was remiss to what it all meant but I understood perfectly when she kissed me that first time.
I immediately wanted to spurn her in that first perfect moment of bliss and I did for awhile. Eventually we couldn’t resist being apart and our era of email began. Kam and I had fallen out of touch by the time I was fourteen and dating my oldest crush, Noam. Do you remember Noam? He was my slave in third grade and we broke each others hearts. Over time this would be something we’d grow quite used to but at this point, we were head over heels and finally able to express it. I had ignored Kam and all her problems. I called myself her best friend and loved her to the fullest of my capacity yet I shunned her thoughtlessly. It wasn’t until I was sixteen that I would understand the error of my ways.
After my fling with Noam, I had met the perfect man and his name was David. We had met through my band director, Ms. Mattison. One day while I was talking to her during freshman year before a football game, David walked in and asked for the mascot uniform. We weren’t supposed to know who the mascot was but this blonde haired blue eyed boy caught my eye and held me there forever. He was perfect and my “only” true love. Towards the end of my freshman year, David and my love fell apart but it was still alive in me. In the middle of my sophomore year, David and I reconnected. I told him of my never lost love and he told me that he felt the same. Only after this did he tell me of his girlfriend that he wouldn’t give up for me because he didn’t want to hurt her feelings. I was crushed beyond belief. It was the start of that summer, the end of my sophomore year that he shunned me altogether.
It was also the start of that summer that I got an unexpected call from Kam. However, I didn’t answer it because I was too wrapped up in my heart break from David. I told myself that I would call Kammy tomorrow, that I would feel better then. That next night, with Kammy out of mind because I forgot, her step sister, Amy, called me. Her midnight phone call woke me from my peace and shattered my already fragile world. She killed my heart and soul with six words: Kammy’s dead, it was a suicide. My only true lesbian love had killed herself because she felt no one accepted her for being gay. It brought me back to memories of our emails:
“Kam, I miss you beyond belief and I think about the day you left me every single moment of my life. I remember our kiss and what it awakened within my soul. I love you undoubtedly, that I know for sure as well as you do. I love you as you love me, more than just friends but I don’t know if we can ever be. I don’t know if I can accept what that will make me. I don’t know if I could ever accept our love as a reality and until that day comes, I don’t know if I can accept you.”
I seem like a monster, I know. I practically killed the only good thing within my own soul. I know she was thinking of me and those words as she took her life out on her farm in North Dakota
And I know I’ll never have her back.
I know that part of me will always be missing.
I just haven’t been able to search within my own soul to see what’s damaged beyond repair during the year of my upheaval.
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