Me

Explanation

How do I say this? I know some people wouldn’t want to be caught dead with me for a day and some people abhor the way I do things. Some friends think that I’m going to be anorexic or some wrist-slashing girl. Or rather, they see me as the number one candidate for the post of sucking up to people.

Well, all I can say is that those speculations are way off.

Do any of you know me? In primary school I was the person who was the most into romance novels and love stories. I had a fling with classical music when I was in my sixth year. I think I was the only person who carried a novel to school then with a really good kissing scene.

I think I’m the way I am, namely, the girl who doesn’t hang out much or talk to her classmates about stars and Korean dramas or anime or does facebook or dances to good music or join the group in the same sentiments for or against someone, because I’m scared. I’ve been to a point where I could see myself abandoning my old self completely and becoming a cool, popular girl who was always looked up to.

Only I don’t want that. I don’t want to lose my love for literature or art or of God. I feared myself walking into a museum one day and finding myself bored. I’m drawn to the pop culture and all, I don’t mind talking when there’s assembly, its just that there’s always this sinking feeling like when I know that someone knows that I’ve read Sabbath’s Theatre by Philip Roth and regretted it.

Most of the adults find me mature and all that. Perhaps it’s just my upbringing. Imagine a single child with parents with her almost constantly. My parents went through the best times of my childhood with me. Those good times weren’t when I played with my friends in kindergarten because they called me a pig. Those good times weren’t during my early primary school days when people on my bus called me an ABC (American-backside-cleaner). I went to them when this happened and I learnt that if you told adults, they could get something fixed, and fixed rather well.

I’ve been to the precipice, where I could have gone on to read every single good teenage romance novel or high school drama. Believe it or not, my mother started me on Jodi Picoult. I could have become someone who could talk about whatever it is people like to talk about when they send notes around the class, but then I didn’t want to lose the other life I lead. If I started to be more like my age, wearing trends and buying magazines or watching weird videos on YouTube, I think I would have lost it.

If I followed that path, I would be playing Maple Story (which I was once addicted to), re-reading parts of stories where the love-chatter was at a high (which I sometimes do), becoming more insensitive to the world, joining a C0-Curricular activity that wasn’t as under populated as debate, and failing. I get drawn into some things very easily and I think I know myself well enough to stay the way I am because I know that I’ll be staying back for remedial because I flunked a test. I had horrible test grades in primary school when my friends broke off from me and I didn’t want that experience again, where people would see me as so utterly desperate for friends and fitting in.

When I was unbothered by the friend-political-cycle, I could write beautiful narratives. I remember two of them most clearly. One was about a raging fire in a high storey office building, of the pictorial sort. I ignored most of it and dived straight into a plot about an aged man who had his office at one of the higher floors. His business was failing and his granddaughter, who hugged a teddy bear, was with him. I can’t remember it all but it was the ashes from the ancestral niche that caught fire, which spurred a fire nothing could stop. The man regretted and tried to save the girl. In the end, there was only a glass bead from the teddy bear reflecting the devastation around it.

The second was about a car accident. A man was drunk and trying to commit suicide on the road. He didn’t feel remorse and simply drove the car into a boy who had just won the top prize for bicycle race. The boy lived, he didn’t. But still, I didn’t want my life to end like those two.

Since I’ve got to the stage where I am, I don’t want to reverse the cycle in order to fit in. People I actually hang out with don’t mind me being that way at all. It’s not like I’m going to be stuck in the netherworld of adolescence forever. I’ve got only this span of years and I can’t add a cubit to it.

But then maybe I’m wrong. Maybe I missed the whole point about growing up.