This morning I suddenly thought about the small fragments of memories I have from my homeroom class in NZ, when I was around 11 years old. It’s sad and funny how childhood memories hit you sometimes, when you clearly know they’re there, still living in the past. Every time you think about it, something shifts, whether it’s your feelings towards it, or additional details that might have happened, but there is no way for you to be sure. And you don’t know why it suddenly arrives at your mind either, perhaps something in the multiple dreams I had prior to waking up triggered it. This time I thought of a significant occurring that I’m not sure why I haven’t thought about a lot.
Mrs. Matheson, our homeroom teacher, let us sit around a circle, all of us little girls on the blue-grey, clean and comforting carpet. I think we saw a video of this exercise being carried out or something, and she wanted us to try it too. I think the exercise was that we would go around in the circle and all had to say something that is our fear, or something that’s bothering us, or get something off our chest, something along those lines. I didn’t have serious problems back then, I was mostly a carefree and nervous child, always being the new kid and resorting to comedy or randomness to make people think I’m strange or funny. This was before things like my mother falling ill or the christchurch earthquake happening. so I said, I’m not very confident and I wish I had more of it, I lost confidence after moving around a lot. I said, I used to be so confident and brave, like when I entered a biking race despite having no idea how to ride one. (The teacher had to drag my bike and I across the grass. But I was happy and didn’t care. I had a mince pie, my favorite, in a brown paper bag before the race. I wasn’t nervous at all.) Everyone else said something around the same seriousness. Then it came to kate, who was an awkward-feeling tall girl with wispy blonde hair, almost transparent and a very pale and mole-like structured face. She doesn’t seem to have close friends, and is always excluded from things even though e don’t voice it. I remember I abandoned partnering up with her one time and went to talk to the cool girl emma who I’ve only befriended the night before in the boarding house, staying up past lights out and watching forbidden videos. She said I was funny. anyway, kate was always a bit of a loner in the school and I felt bad for her sometimes. I did talk to her, I think. But what she said at that moment shocked us all. She said she had always wanted to kill herself, and had tried to do it. I can’t remember if she was crying. The strange silence that slammed down on us weighed a ton. Nobody knew what to say. Mrs Matheson probably offered some words of kindness. It was too much for our small minds to register. I haven’t even thought about the concept at all in my life at that point. I have never really said the words ‘commit suicide’ out loud before. They felt weird coming out of my mouth, some foreign concepts that would only make sense when I grow older. That’s how I felt when I told genevieve, my one best friend, about this. But she took it so casually, I felt strange. After kate’s turn (maybe the girls around her gave her a group hug, I don’t remember clearly but I would hope so) aisha had to speak. But instead she was crying, so red in the face, and shook her head like she wanted to say so many things but couldn’t say it out loud as it was too painful. This accentuated the depressed tension in the air and we all felt exactly how serious these situations were. I wonder what her pain was. She was a quiet girl who resembled an armadillo or ant eater. at least in my memory. She was nice and soft-spoken. I think this experience stuck with me cause it was one of the first emotional shocks that hit me like a flash. It was like it catapulted into the awareness of ‘grown-up’ feelings. Not everything is bright and sunny now. The identity of being a child is rapidly washing away, day by day. We started to develop a consciousness and individuality that comes with good and bad experiences. For some reason, its always the bad ones that stick with you. A trauma in your life is like a bruise. black and blue and purple and grey, swirling and twirling underneath your skin.