waiting

I still remember my very first journal entry. I was ten years old, and it was approximately 7:30am. I was waiting at my old elementary school for the big yellow bus to come take me to my new magnet school. My first journal was a small white diary with blue and red pencils and black horizontal lines printed on the cover. I wrote that morning in a very sarcastic voice, about how GREAT it was and how damned lucky I was for it to be raining and cold.

Subsequent journal entries that year would be about S, a boy in my class who shared my bus stop and waited with me each morning. I had the hugest crush on him for two years, but I could never gather the courage to tell him.

I was a horribly shy child, my nose always buried in a book. My fourth grade teacher had to call a conference to discuss with my parents what to do regarding my startling behavior of ignoring everything she said, preferring instead to spend my class time leisurely reading a novel. At the time, I was deeply engrossed in the works of Anne Rice and Gaston Leroux, the macabre content of which greatly disturbed my instructors. I’m surprised I didn’t turn out a goth kid.

It was not until two years later that I moved away from dark stories of vampires, phantoms, and the supernatural, to stories of the interminable suffering of mere mortals. It took me six months to finish the unabridged version of Les Miserables, and when I finally closed the cover of that heavy tome, I felt I knew much more about the sacrifice and inequity of human existence than a girl who had not yet begun to menstruate should know.

Fourteen years later, I am still writing, on this blog and in a tattered journal whose brown, coming-apart cover depicts an ancient world map.

Fourteen years later, it's still raining outside and I'm still waiting for someone to pick me up and take me somewhere safe, where I can sit, bury my nose in a book, and ignore all else.