m

OLDER

READS

RINGS

D-LAND

GUESTBOOK

2004. In a few months, I will have been out of high school for ten years. Ten. Years. I guess that's not so bad when you consider that on my next birthday, I will only be 25.

Anyhow, a memory sprang to my conscious this morning. I don't know where it came from. I was diagnosed with my disorder in the eigth grade, just before I turned 13. My mom came in and explained it to my fellow eigth graders in the hopes that they would stop treating me like a leper. It helped only a little. At any rate, when it came time for the science fair, I did my project on my disorder. I guess it was my way of thumbing my nose at all those who treated me differently--or, more hurtfully, just ignored me. There was this guy named Frank in my grade and he had a sister named Jennifer. Jennifer was a sophomore and she was pretty. She was a cheerleader. She was normal. She was everything the backboard to my project seemed to scream that I never would be.

And she was there. At the frickin science fair.

I'd guess she got roped into driving Frank, and she spent her time there perusing the projects. I had pamphlets with all the medical jargon explaining Friedreich's (FREE-dricks). To me, they were more for show, there to add to the legitimacy of a project that I had spent little time on. It required little time--my daily routine was the damn experiment. The pamphlets weren't very understandable to the average individual, but here came Jennifer and she smiled trepidatiously and picked up a pamphlet.

I knew that everyone there--parents, students, teachers and judges--had been watching me out of the corners of their eyes all morning to see if I could really hack the scrutiny I was subjecting myself to by putting my life on display. I felt their concern. But as Jennifer stood there, reading one of those fucking chartuese pamphlets that were certainly still warm from being forged in the bowels of Hell, at that point in my young life, I had never felt like more of a spectacle.

"Is this what you have?" she asked me softly.

"Yes." I said it with as much pride and confidence as I could fake, but I'm sure my voice cracked or shook or something.

"Well...it...it doesn't matter. I mean, you're still pretty and everything."

There was Jennifer Bresnehan, putting her social standing on the line by even standing near me. And she was holding one of those damn pamphlets! And she was paying me a compliment.

I look back now and I chuckle at the idea that survival seemed so complicated then, what with how to wear your hair, and what clothes to wear and where to shop and`who to hang with. It all seemed like a kind of torture at the time, but Jennifer simplified it all with that assertation, if only for a short time. She had just told me I had all it took to get by, and all it took to beat a terminal disease--at least in school. I was pretty and that was all that mattered.

"Thank you." I blushed with gratitude.

I'd bet she doesn't remember that science fair. I doubt she even remembers that I exsist. I've had tears in my eyes while typing most of this entry. In the brutal world of high school, Jennifer was compassionate enough to reach out to me, ever so briefly, and give me a little branch to hold onto in the torrential current of 'cool' that I was doomed to never be a part of. I have never forgotten her or that brief conversation that changed me--allbeit in a small way--forever.

design by fergie

Bits of fire in the sky push me east back home. I used to live in flames but it's hard on the wings. Choke me. Smoke me. Scare me back. You try but you just can't. I peel the layers in my spare time, and you're easy to see through. I can fly, I've discovered on my own. I may be the lesser butterfly but my wings are just as strong. Who are you to tell me to find a place to land? I may be the lesser butterfly but baby watch me glide.