My attendance at school wasn’t good, but I was still there enough to make friends. Everyone at least knew who I was because there were only 115 students in the entire school. After Vincent was shot I started going every day, but when Yue disappeared, it was all… it was all just too much. The morning after I found out I started going down the steps from my apartment and just froze. My legs refused to move and I started crying. After about 20 minutes my mom came out on her way to work and started yelling at me, but all I could do was just look at her. After a while she said if I wasn’t going to go to school to just get back inside, so I went and stayed inside that entire day… and the next day… and the next day. I hardly left my house for two years and was forced into homeschooling, all the while getting sicker and sicker. I never received a phone call from any of my piers or any communication at all. I was gone, and no one cared.
It was at this point, this point of endless pain and chaos, that Jesus saved me. I devoted myself to studying the scriptures day in and day out. I was obsessed with drowning of the sorrow with the word, and in the process I forgot… everything. It was so convenient. I didn’t think about Vincent, or Yue, or the Bloods, and it was like it never happened though it still left a lingering burden, like trying to breathe next to a pile of garbage bags. The hatred faded, and my dream of being a hero became possible again.
I studied myself and learned if I slept a certain amount, if I ate certain foods, if I didn’t stay out late, and if I took special medicine I could fight my sickness and so, after two years I began to go to public high school. Though every day of my life had become an indistinguishable blur, losing the only people who ever loved me left a lingering cloud of depression I couldn’t shake. I had no idea where the feeling came from, and as such I disregarded it and filled myself with every positive aspiration I could.
I didn’t have many friends, since I had to take such meticulous care of myself, but I excelled at everything I did. I could feel the hope of fulfilling my dreams explode within me with every passing assignment. I got a 98.6 average and maintained it. I was placed in advanced courses, given awards, and even got to intern at Mount Sinai research facilities. Everything was going well, but every year I got sicker and sicker. By junior year it was so bad I would get respiratory infections that would last four weeks, even with medication. Over time I was unable to keep up with the advanced work. I went to my guidance counselor to try and switch out my advanced classes for regular ones, but she told me I could not. She said many of the students were dropping the AP classes and, because of my absences, I could either be left back or switch to homeschooling…
The dream died then and there. I couldn’t understand why it was happening. I had thought if I worked my hardest, if I did my best, if I accomplished above and beyond, I would be able to make it. But I was wrong, after all that work I lost it all and was forced back into homeschooling. No one ever called me, or visited me. I spent day after monotonous day lying in my bed, looking out the window at all the people living their lives and couldn’t understand why I couldn’t be freed of this agony.
I started praying more than five hours a day and reading my bible and doing my school work, but the fire was gone and I couldn’t do anything about it. I often had to take care of myself when I was sick. My family got tired of me always being sick and complained that I was just being a whiner. I would sometimes be lying in my bed, unable to move, with a 103 degree fever and my family refused to help me until it was convenient for them. Whenever I would try and argue with them they would yell at me like I was being unreasonable. I guess it is unreasonable to expect someone to take care of something that has no value… And I prayed to God to remove the pain from me… and His answer to me was no… He said I would have this pain my entire life…
Eventually the days blurred together for me and all that I was emptied out. All of those dreams and all of the vibrant shades of life I had cleaved to diminished and faded into a morbid shade of grey. I lost all joy, all happiness, and all sense of purpose. Never the less I continued on the path which I believed to be right with nothing more than will power.
Another five years passed and I finally saw a specialist who performed surgery and freed me from my sickness. I eventually got a part time job working with children and a small spark of that old dream returned to me. I had lost the joy of my own life, but the future of the children was something worth fighting for. Their smiles kept me alive for quite some time. I began to pull out of my slump… I wanted to become a teacher. I began to build new friendships, even though I had grown strange and cold from isolation over all those years. I joined a new church, and things were good for a while.
When I turned 20 I tried to have a get together with a bunch of my friends. A group of about 19 agreed to come, but only two actually showed up. A bunch of the others dropped by the restaurant but said one of their other friends was turned 21 and they wanted to go to that instead. I played it off at the time, but this would prove to be the beginning of the end for me.
One day, after a Saturday morning prayer meeting, a suddenly had a vision where God told me to look within myself. So I did and I saw myself as a young child, horribly disfigured, beaten, and bleeding. And I heard God say “it’s time for you to heal the past wounds. Dedicate yourself to this or you will never move forward”. I knew I couldn’t remember anything from when I was five up until I was about sixteen, but I had no idea what I was in store for.
I spent the better part of a year in and out of therapist, psychologist, psychiatrics, and all other kinds of mental specialist offices trying to recover the memories I had lost. One day, seemingly out of the blue, I had a flashback… of a bullet going through Vincent’s forehead, and my entire world was eclipsed… A life that was difficult suddenly became unbearable, and a pain unlike anything I had ever seen or heard of overtook me.
That’s when the nightmares started. I couldn’t even close my eyes without seeing him and I went nearly a week without sleep. With each sleepless night more and more memories came back to me, and I relived the story of the three kids who didn’t have anything. I heard them laugh, I pulled her hair back as she frantically yelled at me about what kind of man I would become, and I lost them all over again… sometimes it was hysterical crying, or fits of rage, beating the walls and breaking anything I could get my hands on, but nothing helped. It was like every bit of pain I had ever experienced was all balled up together, and it had a heartbeat.
It was around this time that I began to have arguments with my church and I put distance between us. I couldn’t shake the feeling of worthlessness and nothingness. I couldn’t protect them… I couldn’t accomplish my dream… I couldn’t see any reason at all to continue living. The love which they had shown me was just a distant dream now, I couldn’t feel it anymore, all I could feel was the pain of losing them. So I spent all my time trying to do as God said and I discovered what it would take to bring me back. If I could be loved like that again, not by the God who promised me a lifetime of pain, but by someone I could see and touch I could start again. I only had one friend left, a co-worker of mine.
So I did everything I could for this friend, I was there for her as best as I knew how to be. And when her boyfriend left her I was there with her, even until midnight just talking through it, hoping she would be the one to show me that I’m worth something, that my life had any value at all.
And my 21st birthday came. We made plans three days before to go to a restaurant only three blocks from her job. I didn’t want a repeat of the no show from the year previous so I only invited her. My trusted friend.
Come the night of my birthday I sat alone in that restaurant… she had forgotten... It took forty minutes before she picked up her phone and she eventually made it to the restaurant. She said she had forgotten because she was out late the previous night at someone else’s birthday party. Then she spent the night on her phone acting like this was the last place on earth she wanted to be. I spoke to her about the way she behaved that night and she acted like it was ridiculous for me to be upset, she practically laughed at me. And that was the last straw.
I took a walk to the bridge near my job and looked out over the edge of the railing. I could see Vincent and Yue in the waters 100 feet below me. They just shook their heads and, after a moment, I turned back and went home, but I won’t be able to turn back much longer. At first I wanted to wait for them to nod their heads before I go down to join them, but I don’t think I can stay strong much longer. There is a scripture which says the Lord will not allow you to be tried beyond what you can handle, but I have seen that it’s not true. My pain now is so unbearable I can hardly function. It pierces through every minute of every day for me, like the unbearable ringing noise in an otherwise silent room. It doesn’t stop; it just gets worse and worse with every passing grievance.
And now to get to the point. I haven’t shared all this with you because I want your pity, or sympathy, or any sort of attention. This biography has been constructed for one reason. <staff edit> I want to pass something on. I want to pass on our dream to anyone who’s willing to take it, a dream to make things better for people who don’t have anything, and to prevent a story like this one from ever happening again. I have to apologize to you Yue, Vincent … I couldn’t become the man you wanted me to be… The last thing I want is for this all to be in vain so I ask that someone would please do something with this dream I couldn’t achieve.
Sincerely,
That fat violent kid
That fat violent kid
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