Day 53 Throwback

“March 14, 2004

Pre-IB English II, Period 1

The Other Me

The little girl is strange.

She answers to the nickname Kit Kit (who names their kids that?) so many times that her real name is forgotten. She’s quiet. Almost too quiet, if you know what I mean. She only opens her mouth to either yell or laugh.

Not like me at all. I’m associated with a group where you have to yell if you want to be heard. She’s quiet all right, but she’s damn fast.

I can see her sometimes. Her outline is faint, like she’s going to disappear soon, as she practically burns rubber on her track shoes that she’s had for two years already. She sprints from the foot of the oil-stained driveway of the empty yellow house all the way to the grafittied stop sign at the edge of the cul-de-sac, the furthest her mother will permit her to leave. I catch a glance every now and then of her standing at the edge, stationary atop her brand-new hot pink bicycle that’s a little too high for her. With one scuffed sneaker on the ground to hold her steady, she scrapes at the white street paint indicating where she has to stop, as if blaming the line for holding her captive in the cul-de-sac.

I’m not fast. My body has grown unfit to barrel down those oval tracks at a speed some would consider inhuman lkike the little girl does. I’ve spent too many hours at desks, hunched over endless work, and the rest of my hours either in bed or in front of the television in a futile effort to relax and temporarily forget the work that must be done. I am free to walk about, but a chance has clamped itself on my leg, attached the many reminders of the duties I have to fulfill. And so, I am trapped. Just like the little girl called Kit Kit, I guess

Despite our differences, we have some common aspects. Like, for one thing, we cannot leave wherever we are. We are attached to our environments by obligations and demands. Also, neither of us can seem to look in the mirror.

The little girl stares down at the sink every time she washes her face or brushes her teeth, refusing to look up at her reflection. She doesn’t want to see her Oriental eyes and the curly hair her parents encourage her to be proud of. She fears that, if she does, her glance will go to her neck, then to her shoulders, and then down to her arms and stomach. She doesn’t want to see it.

Me? I can’t look in the mirror because, every time I do, she stares back at me. That little girl. She’s always there staring at me with her chinky eyes and frizzed hair of ebony. But the one thing I can’t stand to look at is those marks. They’re all over her. On her neck, on the insides of her elbows, some on her back. Some are black with dried blood, some pink in current effort to heal itself, but most are scathing red, fresh and anew, recently created. So recent are these self-inflicted cuts that the dirt and blood are still underneath her fingernails. It hurts to look at her and I sometimes have to clutch my own arms and feel the smooth skin to remind myself that I am not her because the reflection is so real.

But the little girl seems not to mind this on the outside. She is too intent in laughing and yelling for joy when her team has more points than the other to care about her appearance. But I know that the little girl cares. You can see in the way she laughs and talks, like she’s afraid to stop doing either because it will draw attention back to the marks she carries around her like a bloody shadow. She does not wish to be reminded.

The little girl is disappearing slowly. As the days go on, I find less traces of her around me.

Soon, there will be a day when the black-eyed, curly-haired girl will be gone. And I will be very sad to see her leave. For, despite her sickeningly naïve attitude and bright eyes, she has taught me much, about life and true happiness and betrayal. With every lesson I learn, she fades away slowly. She’s in the photos I see on the walls each morning, a ghost to remind me every day of how short life is and how fast it can pass you by.

The little girl is strange. Then again, so am I.”

Over the years I’ve occasionally come across this paper I wrote back in the day. And every time I do, I can’t find it in my heart to throw it away and I always find some strange place to keep it until the next time I manage to find it again, like in a shoebox of middle-school photos, or in one of my text books.

Like my personal Easter-egg hunt…for myself. Haha.

Likewise, I found this essay today while I sorted through the mess that is my bookcase in an abrupt decision to reorganize my room. I believe that, this time, the paper was wedged between my composition notebook from Theater in my junior year and my hardback copy of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.

Like the other times, I remembered what I’d written the moment I read the title. And like the other times, I sat down and reread it anyway, always feeling the same prickling in my eyes when I finished reading the last lines.

Even without the validation by my teacher, written in scrawled red pen, “A++ Thanks for sharing your powerfully-written story” this has been one of my favorite papers that I’ve written. I meant what I wrote then, and the words still ring true today; with every new experience I lose a little bit of myself. And while I fully recognize that it’s all for the better good for my growth as a person, it hurts little to lose that bit of me.

Like finding out that Santa didn’t exist: I get a reality check, but I feel like all the past Christmases were a lie. In the long-run, it’s a good thing I stopped insisting in the existence of an obese man with levitating reindeer powered by the dreams and hopes of children.

It’s really for the best, but it still sucks a little all the same.

…I’m going to hide this paper again, maybe behind my Agatha Christie collection or between my NCLEX review books this time. Can’t wait to find it again.