When you’re substance-free, you realize, life is lonely, isn’t it?
I love rainy nights. There’s a peace to them. A safety. It seems as though rain is one of the few things that can keep the darkness at bay, the darkness that creeps in from under the cracks of the doors and crawls along your skin, resting its cold, oppressive head on your chest. Darkness doesn’t so much have claws as a subtle weight that drags you down from the inside, so slowly, that you don’t notice it’s taken you until the emptiness collapses you from within like a hollow shell.
Tonight, I am thinking about a boy I knew in the 5th grade. He was a really nice kid and always treated me with respect and kindness even though I was a very angry person.
I had transferred to a public school for the 4th grade when my family moved. My parents had discovered my brother’s condition and decided to move us to another town, into a house on a hill in a very isolated neighborhood, away from the potential scrutiny of neighbors and friends. I went from being well-liked at a private Christian school, to a soft, easy target for public-school bullies. I was angry…I hated my parents for ignoring me, I hated my brother for causing the slow disintegration of my family, I hated the other kids for the way they treated me and I hated the teachers for looking the other way. But most of all, I hated the loneliness–the silent poison that tinged every single waking moment and seeped through my body during the abandonment of night.
This boy sat in front of me in Mr. Banfiel’s class. We’d talk every once in a while and he struck me as someone with so much warmth. Sometimes, when he walked by and knew that I was having a bad day, he would give me a comforting squeeze on the shoulder. I could never react in a way that showed appreciation, as by then, I had learned that showing vulnerability meant getting attacked. But it goes beyond words how nice it felt to have him reach out to me in that way, to show me that someone acknowledged my existence and was willing to reach out with kindness rather than with cruelty and destruction.
He also showed me how a person could cut himself. How, if you used ice cubes to numb a body part, you wouldn’t feel the needle tear away at your skin. How, if you were brave enough, you could create scars that made up homemade tattoos with single strokes to produce crisp, clean lines, rather than having to slowly carve away at yourself.
We stopped talking to each other when we moved on to junior high. By high school, he was cutting class and getting into all kinds of drugs and trouble with the crowd he hung out with. Meanwhile, I had pretty much checked out mentally, with my only goal being just to get out of high school alive.
Tonight, I am sitting in my posh Los Angeles condo, nearly 15 years later, with the rain pounding away at the windows as my rumbling heater emanates a cozy warmth. And I’m thinking about him. I’m wondering where life took him and how he’s doing, and I hope that he is also somewhere out of the cold. I pull up the left leg of my black work slacks and run a finger along the inside of my ankle. By the glow of my computer screen, I can see the smooth skin of my leg–soft, even and unblemished. But I know what was once there.
In hindsight, I can see that he was a very troubled kid, just as in hindsight, I’ve come to realize that I was as well. Could anyone see the hurt in these children? Did people notice and not reach out a hand? Did my friend manage to make it out of childhood intact? They say that life is about getting over the traumas of childhood. Some can do it while others are overtaken by it. Sometimes I think life is about refusing to replay the tragic films of your past once you’ve recorded them. Because you spend too much time in the darkness experiencing a painful loop rather than creating better mementos.
Wherever he is, he probably has no idea of the impact he had on my life, or of the positive warmth that I am filled with when I think of this child, who despite his own personal pain, reached out to comfort another. This is one of the things I think about sometimes, small kindnesses that are given without solicitation and are taken without thanks, that remind me that we are all challenged, yet we are all blessed, and that we must never forget to perform the small gestures. Sometimes it’s the little things that have the greatest impact, long after you are gone.