Beginnings

I remember being made fun of a lot in elementary and middle school because I was smart and foreign. That is to say, I remember being unhappy about being left out of what I envisioned to be a very exciting world of fun and socializing. What the kids actually called me or did to me, I can't remember; likely, simply being ignored was the worst of it. My parents did not help the situation as I was never enrolled in a summer camp or a sports team; instead, I was given violin lessons and private math tutorials. I did enjoy both, but they left me with an unquenchable curiousity about what the other kids were doing while I pored over sheet music and equations. My defense mechanisms became denial and imagination. At times, I convinced myself that I was living about the same as everyone else, and at other times, I would imagine everyone else was living like me. Neither fantasy convinced me that I dwelled in the same space as my classmates.

On the surface, my life seems full and interesting now, but the consequences of my childhood experience have been deep. I carry a quiet though ever-present sense of dissatisfaction with me, as though behind every corner there are people, my tormentors grown up, who live a real life, while I still wade through an artificial approximation, a cheap knock-off I create and know is inauthentic. They say life happens, but not for me; for me, life is constructed.

Sally was a victim of this world-view, an obstacle she could never see or understand but which made her just another illusion in my virtual reality. It silently and insidiously knocked down everything she tried to build for us. It knocked her down too.