Just found this in my journal. Old journal falling apart and I thought how funny, things have moved on and on from there. Now it's 2010, and I've been out of high school so long. So what have I learned? I guess that goth phase was just a costume, in a way. A way to break out of the cute mold I was suffocating in. Jimmy, Jimmy. I was devastated when he was shot, that day that kind of blew apart my sense of being safe. You don't even know you feel that way until something shatters it. I thought I knew the dangers of the world, from the Nazi's in World War II to Columbine, I thought I knew, but I knew nothing. Those things are only frightening tales in books and under the glass of television screens. You can't know about it until it comes into your world. That day, that unreal day when Rick shot Jimmy, I'll never get over that day. There is only dealing with it, dealing with it in different ways across the decades, but it will never be over. I learned that.
Craig. Craig. That boy was so much more than I ever bargained for. In grade nine it was so innocent. It had the pinkness of beginning, the newness like a tiny flower bloom just unfurling. He would say those things, kind of deep, kind of hopeless. Maybe I know a little better where that came from. I know about his mother dying and his father abusing him. I know that he was still in fear of that back then, grade nine, since his father was still alive and would presumably get him back. But I fell in complete and hopeless love with him, and I thought we were so mature and our relationship was like a marriage. That's what I thought in grade ten, and little did I know that he was cheating on me and getting other girls pregnant. That cut me so deep, it was this almost physical pain. It ached. I remember just laying in my bed wanting to die from the pain. I loved him so much and he shattered me.
Ellie and Paige. Ellie has smoothed her rough edges and Paige has mellowed. I like who they've become, and I kind of miss who they were. Maybe they miss me.
But it hasn't all been Degrassi and Toronto. I escaped for awhile. I went to England, and Craig was right. I wanted to go there ever since I saw Mary Poppins when I was little. I liked the way they talked and the way it looked over there, and I think I sensed the extreme influence of their culture on ours. It was the language I spoke, and I wanted to go to the place it started. Did little kids in Quebec want to go to France in the same way? I bet some of them did. The motherland. And I fled there in the wake of Craig's manic-ness that I just didn't know how to deal with. I didn't know what to do for him. He was crazy. He was sick, and it was beyond my power to help him. I thought I could for awhile, I thought I could be good for him, and that things could go back to how they were. There's another thing I learned in all these years. Things never go back to how they were. This is a one way street, this life.
I couldn't help Craig and I couldn't restore Jimmy. The only one I could really effect was me, I guess. I immerged from high school with this sense of needing to own my own creativity, my own self. That was what the goth thing had been about. I was trying to take possession of me. I used to share my music with Craig and then Jimmy and it never worked. I've got to be a solo artist. I wonder if I'll get married, or if the music thing is a metaphor for how I like to live my life.
I miss it sometimes, grade eight and grade nine, those early grades. I was so young, and sometimes ignorance is bliss. It hurts, sometimes, the things you know. I know how hurt we can become, all of us, I know how it is to have a wall torn down, to have a defense broken through, and I know how it is to build those defenses again. There was a degree of trust that I had back then that I'll never have again. It would take a lot for someone to hurt me as bad as Craig did because I don't think I'd ever let anyone in to that degree again.
My mom and Jeff are getting married, and I love that. Me and Toby are going all out for it. Maybe I'll be like my mom and get married in my forties. Let life wash over me first. Let the waves roll, and see where I go. That's the same as it was then. I'm going to see where this crazy thing takes me.
