I write this hoping that someone, anyone, is listening to me. My voice is ignored by almost everyone here at Elmore Jr. High, students and teachers alike. I put up with the most ridiculous of situations that go on here; many of which I do not even have proper equipment for. Everyone that lives here (and only some who used to) knows that Elmore is no normal place. It's filled with all kinds of different people and children. Some of these children I know almost too well unfortunately. My two worst here are Gumball Waterson and Teri. Teri is (clearly) a hypochondriac who makes my job a nightmare. It's always something with her. Just this morning, she came to me complaining that she felt symptoms that were clearly just her being hungry and even once criticized me for being incompetent and useless. Made me so irritated I just wanted to throw her out my window. Fortunately, Gumball's brother Darwin did that for me when he sneezed her out due to an allergy problem. I quickly turned them both away, wanting him to not only leave me alone, but also get as far away from me as possible.
The reason I hate him alongside Teri more than anyone else here lies in what he does. He is nothing but trouble to me. Every time something regarding an injury happens, he is somehow responsible for it. I can't explain how, but I know many students have found their way to my office because of him. Banana Joe, Bobert, some hybrid bunny-duck creature, and almost the entire school once in an oil fire. Teri is annoying and Gumball is trouble, but I deal with others here that go unnoticed. I no longer feel fulfilled helping young students, but I GUARANTEE that any nurse in my shoes would be the same way. Of all places to possibly do some good, having to work her drives me to near depression and exhaustion. Becoming a nurse was not always my plan though. I actually planned on becoming a doctor, but I'm getting ahead of myself. In order to understand who I am and why I'm here, I have to go back. Back to the when I first wanted to pursue the health field. That…was the loss of my mother.
I remember wanting to do something in health when I was just a little younger than the kids here. I was inspired by my mother. She was a nurse when I was little, but wanted to go all the way and become a doctor. She almost succeeded too…almost. It was when I was 13 that my mother contracted a bacterial virus that made her skin turn green. She became infested with mold, both in and out, and no cure was found for her ailment at the time. She was only two years away from graduating medical school when it happened, and the last words I ever heard from her were No matter what happens to me, make yourself proud of who you want to be…help others who need you more than I. She told me these words on her deathbed at the hospital one day after school. All I could do was cry with my father beside me, who told me that my mother wanted me to be more than she could ever be.
I thought long on their words, both my moms and dads. After graduating school, I promised I would help others more than my mom ever could by following in her footsteps to become a doctor. I then graduated from college with a Bachelors in Nursing (avoiding Pre-med in case I did not get into Medical School) and applied to become a doctor. I was accepted and went there for two years. While there, I met a man named John, and we just hit it off. Our first date was over a cup of coffee and over time, I thought I had found my true love. We were young, fun, and passionate for each other.
Then one day, after dating for three months, he called me saying he couldn't come over because he was too sick to go to classes. Being the kind person I was, I decided to bring him some warm soup and keep him company, but what I found was not relieving. When I showed up at his doorstep and opened the door, I found him kissing another girl. I was shocked and angry all at once. When he noticed me standing at the foot of the door, he threw the woman to the ground and told me he could explain. I didn't wanna hear it though and threw the hot bowl in his face. His cries of pain were matched with my tears and whining as I ran away from him down the hall of his residence. I ran back home and just stayed there. I fell into such a deep depression that I stopped attending class. I never went out, kept the blinds shut, never answered to visitors, and just became a mess. I never heard from John again; he didn't call, check up, leave a message, or even complain to me about what I did to him. I thought that he thought I was dead to him. After a few weeks of ditching, the university I attended forced me to take an extended leave of absence due to emotional problems, seeing me unfit for proper coursework until my issues were resolved.
I ended up returning home to Elmore and stayed with my father for a while, a complete wreck like I was back at school. I rarely went out, practically ate nothing, and felt like just giving up on life. My father recommended that I try to get myself back out there, but I was too gone and he was too old to do anything about it. To me, my life was over…or at least, that's what I thought. My father asked me to drive him to the hospital one morning after he woke up and complained that he couldn't feel his legs. I grabbed him and rushed him to the hospital, knowing it was the last place on earth I wanted to be at, but little did I know that day would change my life forever.
When we made it to the hospital, I handed him over to the staff and waited out in the waiting room. I sat down in a chair next to a man I had not seen in years. He was white, puffy, wearing a rainbow colored shirt, and held up a magazine. As I looked around the hospital, I couldn't help but notice all the doctors, nurses, and staff members around me. They were arguing about how to help patients, what medicine worked best, and all kinds of other small details. I rested my elbow on the arm rest parallel to the man and put my chin on my hand, sighing with great depression.
"Sounds like you've had a pretty rough day, huh?" said the man as he continued to hold up his magazine. His voice was raspy, but calm and melodic. I faced away from him in my response, only caring in him because all I had left to do was wait and die.
"More like a rough life if you asked me," I said with my head still resting on my shoulder.
"Aww, come on now," the man spoke. Unbeknownst to me, he pulled the magazine away from his face and stared at the back of my head. "Life is precious and beautiful."
"Not to me it isn't. I can't wait for the world to just take me away." I turned my head and faced the man head on, caught off guard by his appearance. His happiness made me sick inside, but there was something else about him. He looked familiar to me as I stared at him, trying to recap where I've met him before.
"Do you work here by chance?" replied the man.
"No, but I wish I did. I was going to become a doctor, but…let's just say that stuff happened." I couldn't place it, but I knew I had seen this guy before. The question was where from.
"So is that why you don't like yourself right now? Because you gave up?"
"No, it's not that. Look…I was…in love and…it just ended…badly, ok?" The question he asked next almost made me want to kill him for some reason.
"And why did you love this man," like it was any of his business to dwell into my life.
"Who are you? A therapist? Councilor? Or are you just bored?" was my reply. He looked at me with squinted eyes, trying to figure out why I was so mean to him. He looked at me like a hawk; staring right into me, but with grace and wisdom. After a minute of silence and awkward staring, he finally spoke before I broke.
"You seem to lack happiness, but I got a feeling that it's because you aren't loving yourself…You rely on the love of others to make you happy more than you love yourself, and that's why you're speaking to me, am I right? Because you're hoping that I give you some love and attention." I knew subconsciously he was right, but driven by instinct to protect myself; I lashed out at him in ferocity.
"Who do you think you are to just criticize my life, huh? You think I don't have love because people don't care about me? Is that it?" He remained silent for a while, and then spoke up in defense.
"I'm not saying you shouldn't rely on others to give you care, but you do need to learn to love yourself as well." His smile slowly descended into a frown. "Otherwise…it could seriously hurt you more than you might think." He turned away from me momentarily and pulled out a brown wallet. "I want you to see something that I myself sometimes don't like to see." He opened his wallet and showed an assortment of pictures. Some from when he was a young(er) adult and others from his adolescence and teenage hood. Only after seeing the top photo, a picture from when he was 12, did I realize suddenly who he was.
"*GASP* Smalls? Is that you?" He gave me a smile and pointed to his 12 year old picture. He wore a pink shirt with yin-yang on it.
"Yep. It's me Rachel" he said, calling me by my name and facing me with happiness in his eyes now that I had guessed him. "But this was not who I always was." He dragged his finger down to the fifth picture, pointing at it like the first. "This was me after graduating high school." The picture was a complete opposite of him both now and as a kid. He was wearing a torn up black t-shirt with tattoo sleeves running over his puffy arms. He wore along with it black jeans with a silver belt buckle, a necklace with a skull around him, and his hair was not the puffed up white mass it usually had been. Rather, his hair was made into the form of black dreadlocks that ran halfway down his back. The picture left me near speechless. This was not the man I knew back then.
"THAT was youuuu?"I exasperated, pointing to the picture along with him. My jaw was halfway open as I looked at it. Mr. Smalls pulled the picture out of his wallet sleeve and handed it to me to hold.
"Indeed it was. I was once what you called a goth." I was silent for the moment, but had to ask.
"What…what happened to you? I don't ever remember you being like this." He couldn't explain it facing me. He had to look away, staring straight across the waiting room at the hospital registry desk. He needed a few seconds to gain his thoughts. He took a deep breath, exhaled through his nose, and felt calm enough then to explain (in flashback to him).
"After high school…Things didn't turn out as well as I thought. I never applied to college, so my parents told me to either enroll or move out. I decided to leave and stayed with a friend, who got me a job delivering pizzas. It wasn't fun or easy though, and I started taking abuse from customers and employees. It made me…depressed. When I tried turning to my parents for help, they said that I had to figure it out on my own. I felt betrayed, unloved, and lost." It looked as though he was getting worse with every word he spoke.
"Eventually, I joined a group that said they knew my pain and taught me about the real world; that it wasn't all dandelions and that innocence was a joke to society used by the government. I became a Goth to be accepted, but took their advice too seriously and started to give up on life. I fell into such a great depression that I had completely just given up. I never went out, started to starve myself, and didn't speak with any of my friends or family anymore….not even the Goth friends I made. I just sat around all day, waiting for death to come and take me away." He turned to face me now, hoping that he had me captivated.
"One day, I thought it had finally happened. I was lying on my couch, face up at the ceiling after not eating for five days and drank nothing but soda to dehydrate me faster. I just looked up at that unlit ceiling, staring off into space. Without me even seeing it coming, my vision just…turned white. My sight was completely gone and I had panicked. I jumped off my couch and started screaming and bashing myself into everything around me. I hurt myself pretty bad and, after slamming my head into the corner of a wall post, I fell to the floor, blind and dazed. I had time to think while I was down there and felt like I was not myself anymore." He grabbed my arms now to keep me from moving, really getting into the memory at this point.
"It then occurred to me that this was a sign. This was my life that I chose to live. I lost faith in so much, I forgot everything around me that I ever took for granted. My blindness in reality was just like my blindness to the world. I gave so little care for everything around me, that I took everything I had for granted. Family, friends, a job, life…meaning. I pushed myself as hard as I could to try and find the faucet in my house and, after regaining my focus and about half an hour of more stumbling; I finally drank from the faucet of life. After wrapping my lips and drinking from it for a good while, my vision came back to me. I looked at my hands and observed the tattoo sleeves running up my arms and everything I wore. You know what I did with them?"
"Wh…what?" I asked timidly, fearing his answer, but empowered by his story.
"I ripped it all off of my body. I grabbed my shirt and ripped it in half across my chest, bit down on my sleeves and tore them from my arms, yanked the necklace off me and threw it far away from my kneeling body. I then picked myself up, taking my jeans off as I jumped and stumbled my way to the bathroom, still dizzy from the dehydration and banging of my body. When I got them off and made it to the bathroom, I looked at myself in the mirror and knew I had to one last thing to do. I grabbed my shaving gel, my razor blade, and started to cut and shave my dreads off. I shaved for what seemed like an eternity, but I finally broke those black bars off of my body and let them fall to the ground along with the rest of my black-dyed hair. I pulled my head up to face myself once more, and I saw a completely different person. I saw a man I hadn't seen in what must have been years. Old, bald, and scared, but…but not dark. The old me was stripped away and I saw a new man; a person…reincarnated." He remained silent for a few seconds as he stared up above me and into space.
"I was once like you Rachel: scared, alone, helpless, and unloved. But you know what kept me going?" I looked up at him as his chin pointed down at me.
"What would that be?" I said sympathetically. He breathed in and looked back down on me.
"It was the courage to move on. To push myself to believe that I was capable of anything I set my mind to, and that I did not need to be loved by others, whether friend, family, or someone more, to know how special and great I could be. That I, and I alone, could be inspired to make a difference for myself." He pulled himself away from me, sitting back into a normal position in his chair and his hands on his lap. "After a couple years of study in community college, I couldn't stop looking back on that one day I had that moment and how I was inspired to be a better person. I wanted to help others do that very same, and that was why I decided to become a guidance councilor for children, the most emotionally troubled of all people." He turned his head to face me, slightly crooking it forward as his body faced forward towards the desk across the room. "I feared that, if you don't change how you think about yourself, you'll give up on life as a whole and almost die like I had. Life is too short to be miserable and sad about the things we can't change. I keep this picture on me to remind myself to never go back to being the man I once was."
What he said in the end were the words that changed my life from then on out. "We can't change our past, but we can change and make our futures better and maybe, just maybe, we can make other's lives better for the future too." Despite everything I felt that day, his words touched my heart, an empty vessel of sadness and loneliness that was revived by a man so corny, but helpful. I remember tearing up a little when he said this to me, but what he asked next was what put me here in this office; where I am now.
"You said you wanted to be a doctor, right?" I responded hastily with joy in me for the first time in almost forever.
"Yes! Yes I was. I mean, I have a degree in nursing, but not a doctorate." The sudden realization brought me down some, but lastly very shortly for what came next.
"Well, if you ever want to feel important or special and help others while doing it, I could recommend to Principal Brown about making you our school nurse. We need a new one after the last one quit on us." The words brought some joy into my life that day and, whether I was caught up in the emotion or had nowhere else better to go or do, I told him that I'd love to. After that, I found myself working here a week later, employed and happy. My father turned out to be ok, just some temporary nerve paralysis from sleeping on them wrongly. When I got the job, he was happy for me, and so were the adults and some students there at the time.
Now, I've worked here for almost a decade. I'm not happy with the students or people I put up with, so why do I stay? That question has entered my mind more times than I can remember after everything I've had to put up with. Despite all the craziness and annoying people I get, especially Teri, it still makes me a little happy inside to know that I can help a child in need, no matter how big or small the problem is. Besides, without all the craziness and annoyance that happens here, I guess my life would be somewhat boring without these trouble(some) makers. I could go back to Medical school and finish my doctorate, but compared to what happens her, the doctoral life in a hospital wouldn't be as exciting or entertaining. In the end, I'll take a student laughing about broke a bone from roughhousing than an adult complaining about degree burns on their body. It might not be a glorious job or fun all the time, but these whiny little twerps, despite the sadness and anger I get out of them, make my life worth doing. I've come this far and done so much more than other nurses could withstand, and that just shows how persistent and resilient I am. I only wish I was more appreciated for what I did around here was all.
Anyway, I have to go deal with Teri again. Now she thinks she might have Shingles, even though I can tell it's just a mosquito bite from here. Sometimes, I wonder if I should just burn the picture I have tucked away inside the front cover of this journal; the picture of me with John in front of our Med College. Sometimes, I feel like ripping it up and throwing it away, but I keep it for the same reason Mr. Small keeps his old picture of him. To remind myself that the beginning, like the front cover of this book, might be rough, but I must persevere and keep moving on, writing as I go, and living as I please. I will never forget, but I will never regret. Sometimes, I do question my life choices, even saying it in front of Gumball and Darwin once, but I know, in the end, this is where I am meant to be. I'm not miserable, I just think about the other roads that either can be or could have been taken. It's a tough and unforgiving job sometimes, but someone's gotta do it, and I'm not entirely dissatisfied in that person having to be me.