Painful as they are, the memories are mostly locked away in my mind, not allowed to resurface entirely –but I still remember.
When I was seven, I scraped my knee on the playground. It stung badly, shooting up through my leg and my eyes started to tear up. I didn't want to cry, but I couldn't hold it back, either. I sat there on the wood chips for a moment, silent tears rolling down my chubby cheeks. I heard an older boy laugh at me from the jungle gym, and I only cried harder, small sobs escaping every now and then. The teacher was nowhere in sight, as if I could see them through my wet, blurry eyes.
Someone shouted at me –"What are you, a little girl? Crying's for sissies and babies!" More laughing, endless, daunting… And then the crying stopped, and since I haven't allowed myself to shed tears in front of others.
When I was eleven, I liked a boy in my class –I won't mention his name. He was maybe my first serious crush: I found myself blushing whenever he'd look at me. Others caught me blushing, too, and I heard the whispers and snickering around me. I retreated into the coat I hadn't put away in the cubby. After class I'd always go see the Lovely Boy, trying to make friends, and he was friendly enough to not push me away at first. But a dance was coming up, and, naïve and stupid, I thought I saw my perfect chance. I asked him if he wanted to go with me –he asked if it would be as friends, but no, I wanted it to be more like that 'dating' thing I'd heard so much about. He cringed –"Ugh, you freak!"- and turned away, down the hall. I made it back through the crowd of oblivious students, unnoticed.
That afternoon I went to use the toilet, and ten, maybe fifteen minutes later I limped out with a bloody nose and a busted lip, and my eyes already swollen half shut. I was covered in bruises that no one would ever know about, because it was winter and I could get away with being completely covered.
By sixteen, I was known not to act my age. My mum called me Peter Pan; my classmates called me a slew of heinous names that I still wasn't certain was in their right. I was an outcast but a social person by nature –and I kind of just wanted to fit in. I had a friend who was liminal between the more and less popular kids, and he offered to be my bridge into young society. "Do you want my honest thoughts?" It had been my own choice to nod, all too eagerly. "Be someone you're not. I know all those programs and everything say different, but you have to blend into the popular kids. You have to admit, you are pretty weird, and no one really likes weird. Right now you can't expect to stand out in a good way."
He looked all proud of himself as he pat me on the shoulder and summed it all up. "Fake it to make it," he grinned broadly, and I attempted a weak smile. And I tried –God knows I tried to make it with the cool kids. I didn't know what was wrong with me.
I was twenty by the time I realized it all made sense. It was too late to change what I was –a freak. And a faggot freak, at that. I was making a few friends, now that I started posting videos online. YouTube gave me something to do with my life as it slowly spiraled downward, kept me distracted from the descent. But it was around that same time that I sort of broke –it was the first time I tried to end what little life I had. I spent a week in a looney bin and released to try again, but I was too much of a coward straight away. When I wanted to take the blade to my throat, I'd take it to the fat on my arms and thighs and stomach: never cut too deep, never let them show. After the suicide attempt, and seeing my mother cry over me and the bandages around my wrists, I made an empty promise to never do it again, and went on to suffer in silence.
No one outside my immediate family ever knew about the attempt, and even they didn't know that I kept on cutting because the thoughts never really went away. I was never put on medication –"it's just a phase, and he'll grow out of it." The doctor hadn't even acknowledged I was still there, but I might as well not have been, in my state.
Thoughts of death never escaped me, and at first I wanted them to go away, but when they became a sort of constant in my life I almost welcomed them like a friend.
When I was twenty-two, I found a new friend, a new constant; its name was Dan, and he was my light. And for a while, it was enough.