(A ficlet that I did after watching the series 5 finale. I will never not love Franky)
When I was six years old my teacher asked me to think of something beautiful. We'd been drawing in class and she'd walked over and had seen me coating my paper with black Crayola. Edge to edge black. She took it from me and put a clean sheet in front of me and asked me what I pictured when she said the word "beautiful". I was quiet for a second, pondering the question with all the seriousness a six-year-old puts into things. Finally pleased with my answer I said earnestly, "9/11." It had just happened a few days before and I'd seen it on the television at the care home I was staying in at the time. All the kids around me who heard spun to face me and my teacher's face went hard in shock. I felt my confident smile waver and I leaned back into my chair, watching her face anxiously.
She started to tell me in a half-angry voice that 9/11 was nothing to be joked about, that it was a tragedy and thousands of people had died. I'd just sat back and nodded because that's what I was supposed to do. Feign understanding. But the deaths hadn't been what I was talking about, couldn't she see that? I wasn't thinking about that part of it. It had been the order of it. The synchronization of it. And most of all it had been the people. The interspersed footage of men with soot streaked faces in firemen hats. Their faces, the way they looked so fierce. So determined. Like actual warriors, knights in a new age. They felt like people through the screen. Not like normal news anchors with their perfect hair and their written words. Not like cartoon shows or comedies or morning soap operas. They were people in a world, this world, our world. When I'd watched the news about 9/11 I'd felt like if I reached out my hand and touched the screen I'd feel heat and smell smoke. Be alive in this world that I felt so detached from.
The teacher had taken my hand and pulled me along after her to the counselor's office, dropping my art in the recycle as we went. She didn't get to see me pull out a penny and begin to scrape away the black, revealing all the colors underneath. No one ever got to see me do that and soon even to me it felt like the colors had never existed at all.
I hadn't meant it the way that everyone took it, when I'd said that 9/11 was beautiful. Not really. I mean, 6 year olds say things and expect people to understand the context that they put it in in their head. That statement earned me a big black mark on my foster care record and was probably one of the reasons I never stuck anywhere. Who wants a little sadist in the house?
And that's when I realized I was messed in the head. Different. Wrong. My parents hadn't left me because they were the bad ones. I'd never given it much thought before, never picked an enemy in that. They'd just left me and that was that. I didn't hate them. And I didn't blame myself. But then I realized it was my fault. They'd seen in me what everyone else would eventually start to see. They'd realized I was defective and left me for someone else to deal with. Eventually everyone saw, everyone left. And that's all there was to it.
It's me that's the problem.