My Ancient Herstory in Current Events

“Nostalgia is a time when you knew your place.”
I’ve been wanting to walk around the neighbourhood that I grew up in all summer. The one that we moved to when I was eight. Everywhere that I lived before then is too hood to visit. The grocery store that I used to walk to from my old home is now an ethnic supermarket. I’ve been meaning to hunt down some dried rose petals anyway so I decided that today was the day that I made that little road trip to memory lane. I’ve been feeling a little lost lately so I guess I felt a need to backtrack. It was worth it because I learned how my social anxiety was born.

The walk from that market to my old condominium was a lot shorter than I remember. Everything seemed so much smaller. Everything but the trees that I used to climb anyway. Also, that gum that I put on the top corner of a sign was still there too. I looked at it on every single walk to school, waiting for it to fall off. It’s been twenty years? I walked passed the steps that used to be mine. As I looked at the door to my past I could not draw up any memories from inside there. There are five condominiums that all circle a t-shaped parking lot that I grew up in. At the end of the main parking lot, there was a guy that used to set up a table and trade hockey cards with people that would drive by. Right by the tree that was the last to bloom and the first to lose its leaves. It was already half-naked when I saw it today. In the centre of the buildings at each end of the parking lot, there are two parks. They seem a lot smaller now but they have not changed one bit. I used to do backflips off those swings. I was the king of playing marbles. The king of tetherball and hopscotch. They called me daddy longlegs or a grasshopper because I was impossible to catch. I ruled everything I did back then. #Capricorn

I remember the family that lived right next to us. Their youngest had a three of a kind condition where only half of his brain was functional. He was a pretty bright kid but he had a lot of physical abnormalities that he was insecure about. He was five when I knew him and he also knew that he only had a 20-year life expectancy. Kaylah lived right behind us, we were best friends. I used to watch her play her PS1 & 2 games. Resident Evil 3 was so fucking scary man. We both had a crush on Leon from Resident Evil 2 and Snake from Metal Gear Solid. Our parents thought that we would grow up and fall in love. We grew up to be gay. She had man-crushes on those characters and a real crush on Rinoa from Final Fantasy VIII… which has been remastered and is being released later this year… I’m ALL OVER IT!

Across from Kaylah was Kyle. The boys and I used to look through his father’s porno mags with him and get grossed out. In the building beside that one lived Dustin & Brendan. They were brothers. We spent a lot of time together and also with Mitchell & Curt. We were the boys. Girls called us wormy wormers and I was the only one with sisters so I knew the reference. They all played on a hockey team. I played on a soccer team instead but we used to all get together and play football. I was pretty good at it, believe it or not. I have a random memory of us all seeing each other naked for the first time in a public changing room. We were shy because some of us were cut and some of us were not. We were comparing and contrasting and all that jazz. That whole memory is so stressful. Behind Dustin & Brendan lived Darren & Karen. She is my ex-girlfriend. We even held hands and shared a kiss once lol. Darren and I fought a lot. He used to pick on the big girl Krystal at school and I hated him for that. She and Dianna got bullied daily and I always stuck up for them. I saw Dianna at a bus stop a few years ago, she recognized me and was SO shook when I waved at her with a big smile on my face. I made her fucking day. Kyrstal is lost to me, she does not have social media. Anyway. I pushed Darren off of a generator that we all used to play on. He broke his arm. When he got his cast removed he came for me and pulled my hair. I lost that fight because I had my first real asthma attack. He and Kaylah were best friends throughout their twenties. They did a lot of drugs together. His sexuality is fluid but he did not have the glow up that I did so… ha! Don’t suck it? There was a boy named Martin that was the new kid on the block. He got drunk with his friends and passed out and then died. He choked on his vomit. Yeah… sadness. He was very western European and weird and hard to understand but I thought that he was so super creative and cool. I didn’t talk to him though because he was related to somebody on my soccer team that I hated.

Curt lived in the building right beside mine. I had a friend Jason who lived in the corner of that one. He was from China. His parents used to dry fish out on the railing of their steps. His bedroom was the storage closet. My other friends thought that he was weird but I liked hanging out with him. His family moved and bought a house. He got a proper room and I know that because he happened to live across the street from my mother’s boyfriend. He is a lawyer now and works at the same law firm as my BFF Leanne. My friend Ellenicca lived in that same building as Curt & Jason also. She was from the Philippines. She moved to BC and we were penpals for a bit until we reconnected on Facebook. When I first moved there I had a friend named Matthew that was a familiar face because he used to live a few doors down from me back when I was in the hood. He had a deaf sister that I used to play with also. I thought that she was so cool. Her energy was so bright and intense and I just wanted to be around it. I had such a crush on Matthew though. Nobody remembers him so they can’t help me find him on Facebook. So many kids from my childhood came to mind today. Sandeep! He lived at the end of my street, we were obsessed with the backstreet boys. Backstreets Back album came out and we listened to it on a Discman and we shared headphones. His bike got stolen from my yard one day and his parents decided that I was a bad influence because of that so we were not allowed to be friends. I was so butthurt about that. We played a lot of Mario Cart together man. His mother always offered me some crazy ass food… which was gross then but now it’s the food that I impress all of my friends with when I need to.

Anyway, I walked away from those condominiums toward the elementary school that I used to go to. That walk used to feel so long. I walked past Mae’s house. The last time that I saw that place was a couple of years after she passed away. She was only 16. She was always excited to celebrate her Debut. Turning 18 is a huge deal in her Philipino culture. Her parents held a memorial there at their house and they left her room untouched. I only remember seeing an Avril Lavigne poster in there. Also, I remember feeling guilty when her family was talking about how much she loved music and how much she loved hanging out with her family… I felt guilty because she used to tell me that she was tired of her piano lessons, she didn’t know how to tell her parents that she didn’t want to do them anymore. She also felt trapped within her family and wanted to break out and make new friends but her parents were too strict about letting her out of their sight.

I walked through the field behind the elementary school that I went to. The ice rink and baseball diamond are gone now. Everything else was the same. I walked up to the slide that I fell off of and I broke my arm on. That slide used to be so tall and big but now I am the same height as it. I pictured that field full of snow. I used to meet up with Sherry and Justin by the raspberry bush to eat icicles. Justin now teaches hip-hop dancing lessons for kids and we had a dance-off at our high school reunion. iTwerked it out. I left the park and circled back on a side street that Kaylah and I used to play on. We used to hunt for UFO’s down there and we would steal apples from any yards that had apple trees. I took a side street to get back to my car because I wanted to see the house at the corner. It was the witches house. We all thought it was haunted. Shayna and I went to investigate it one day and we knocked on the door and we asked the old lady if we could pick apples from her tree that was in the backyard. She let us cut through the house and then it was a young lady with red hair that let us out to the front door when we were done. If that ain’t a soul-eating Sanderson sister… lol

I’m feeling a little heartache right now because I avoided one street. The one that Mitchell lived on. He used to live in the neighbourhood that I lived in before I moved there. His mother and my mother were best friends so we spent a lot of our childhood together. Lots of sleepovers and movie nights. His older brother used to babysit my sisters and I. His younger brother and my younger brother were just as tight. I don’t get starstruck but I got pretty starstruck when the Expendables came out to theatres. It featured all of the action stars that I grew up with, I watched all of those old action movies at Mitchell’s house with his brothers. Jean-Claude Van Damme & Arnold Schwarzenegger were my heroes. I feel a little heartbroken when I think about him because of why we grew apart. Just before highschool politics could split us all up I had a huge fallout with “the boys”. We were play fighting and I had a huge freakout when one of them grabbed my junk as a joke. Mitch had to pull me off them and he had tried very hard to calm me down. He knew… that I was raped when I was four and then he accidentally blurted it out in front of everybody. He knew that happened because he was the first person that I told… we knew each other our whole lives but I stopped talking to him immediately. I stopped talking in general. Nobody heard me speak again. To this day I am… still speechless. I can force myself to be a person when I need to be now but it takes a lot of effort and energy because I just feel so vulnerable for no reason. Everything makes me feel embarrassed. It’s not as bad as it used to be though but I still have a long way to go.

What had happened after Mitch blurted out my secret? My friends all started calling me a faggot. Curt was the cruellest of them all. He also started to make fun of me for having a deceased father. My brother told me that Curt used to get Mitchell’s younger brother to give him blowjobs for CD’s. Ugh, ew. Gross. Now Curt is married with a daughter and he swung by my work a few months ago, back when I worked there, and I felt so… shook. We made nice at my sister’s wedding social but he is my foil, my nemesis, my arch enemy and now he knows where I work. I don’t work there anymore, as you might know, but still. Dustin & Brendan remain homophobic to this day… I think? None of “the boys” ever sent or accepted any friend requests from me on Facebook. Everybody that I grew up with that used to troll my Facebook thought I was a model somewhere. Not true so the jokes on me… Anyways, so that is the origin of my social anxiety.

Year & years later our parents arranged a little reunion. My mother and her friends used to get together in Gimili every summer and all of us kids would just hang out and play together. I love that small town. We were all in our late teens for that reunion and I do not remember which friend I spent the whole time with but I avoided Mitch. I did not know how to talk to him. He kept trying to engage and approach me and I remember that moment when he realized that I was avoiding him because I saw the hurt and confusion in his eyes. He kind of stayed to himself. I was never mad at him. I didn’t hate him. I’m honestly still confused about what I felt. My sister sees him all the time. Their kids get invited to the same birthday parties. He was at my sister’s wedding social and I still didn’t know how to talk to him. We shook hands and said hello and that was it. In my mind, I felt that he could still feel that tension. I meant a lot to him once upon a time so of course, he hasn’t just forgotten all about me. There was a movie on Netflix called the Boys in the Trees that shook me up pretty good. It made me think of all this. I don’t even like to talk about it because I don’t understand my feelings here at all. We’re grown men now. He gave up a promising career in the NFL to sell drugs which is legal now. Last I heard he was a janitor at a mall somewhere. I can’t imagine him being a janitor because… this is going to sound offensive be he is an attractive straight white male. This world was made for him to win, how did he end up as a janitor? Why did he quit hockey? He was constantly being scouted! He was SO close to making it.

Before I made it back to my car on my little walk today I circled back to my old high school building. Inside those walls, I had the worse times of my life. Every single day felt like the first day. Nobody knew me, I didn’t know them. I felt like such a freak because I did not speak a word so people assumed that I was mentally challenged. I just wanted to be invisible. I did have a few friends but I was held back half a grade because the teachers thought I was “special needs” so I never got to have classes with them. My grades suffered so much because I was so fashionably absent. When they read my essays and journals and assignments they rushed me out of the program they put me in because it was clear that I was not meant to be in the program that they put me in. The one with all the troubled kids. Teachers loved my journals and essays. They always had a good laugh. I was absolutely terrified about going to class though. My mother had to hire somebody to literally walk me to my classrooms. He was allowed into our house to wake my ass up and to drive my ass to school. I remember that one morning when we sat in his car and he made me late because of what we heard on the radio. It was 9/11. Anyways, I would not sleep on school nights because I did not want school to come faster. All my reoccurring nightmares take place inside that building… but that building did not look so scary today.

Anyways, I did not find dried rose petals today. There were a couple of ethnic food stores in that area and all I have to show for it is a little package of black salt rocks and some fresh curry leaves lol. A lot of emotions and memories were stirred up today. I’m feeling some kind of way about the crossroads that I am on right now. I feel so close to a breakthrough. Some people make a difficult thing simple and some people make a simple thing difficult. I sure make things pretty Tomplicated.

Last updated August 16, 2019