My Farorite Scar

When I was six or seven years old I got a pair of roller blades for my birthday. They were the coolest things I’d ever seen! They were black and purple with green straps and silver wheels, and they were mine. Sharing everything you got for your birthday with your brother because his birthday was four days before yours was a terrible punishment for having a younger brother, but these were just for me.

I could slide down hills, I was learning to move my feet, I’d only tripped once. Things were looking good. So one day, my dad being at my cousins house next door helping shoe a horse, I thought I’d go get him to tell him something important. Better yet, I would skate on over there and see how proud he was that I had gotten all the way over there.

I put my skates on, I strapped them up, and I headed out the door. This was going to be one good day. We’d probably have ice cream after lunch, go to the lake, it was Saturday, Dad didn’t have to go home until Monday. Everything was fantastic.

With a smile on my face I reached the road and started scooting along. I soon realized this was harder than going up and down my smooth driveway, the asphalt was rough and hard to move on. I decided to try something different and walk instead. I had gotten about ten feet down the road and suddenly my skate wouldn’t move. My wheel had gotten caught on something and all I could see was the road underneath me. I remember hearing a smack, and some clashing of plastic on rock, but I can’t remember feeling the impact.

Luckily my older brother, Mike, had been outside in the side yard watching me while doing chores, probably thinking how dumb I looked, as always. But none the less, as he had many times and as an older brother should, he came to my rescue. My older brother ran to my side, picked me up, took me inside, got me some ice and a blanket and laid me on the couch. Mike called my dad and told him to come home, I probably had to go to the hospital.

I did end up going to the hospital, some of my teeth were messed up, I was lucky my jaw wasn’t broken, and I was going to be eating soft foods for a while but it was ok.

The real scar is what I got laying there, waiting for my dad to get back. Mike came back to make sure I was ok. I told him I was. The next thing I remember is the words I will never forget.

“Hey, stupid. Next time land on your butt.” After that Mike left, he was gone, and I sat there crying. Scars heal, you forget pain, but a mean older brother will always be a part of your life.

the sun's gone down on summer

I’d never liked change. I’d never been predictable but somehow I had always been one of those people who preferred stability. Now it seemed the world was ending and I didn’t know what to do. This was the moment I’d been dreading the last three months and suddenly it was growling, spitting and staring me right in the face.


I shuddered, wondering how it was possible to be cold this time of year, but looking back it seemed my whole summer had been frozen. Frozen away somewhere I would always be able to remember, although I couldn’t bring myself to look back. Frozen. I’d done everything I had wanted to yet nothing I’d hoped I would. So cold. Stinging, bitter tears filled my eyes, iced my cheeks, pinched my lips. I shuddered again.

“How did I get here?” I asked myself silently as if someone would hear and know what I was thinking. No one could know. No one, not even the one person I knew would understand. He was gone, and maybe that was what was making everything so hard.

He was gone.

I said the phrase over and over to myself as if that would help me grasp the concept I couldn’t seem to get a hold of. Maybe because it was so true in so many ways.

My best friend, the friend that had always been there for me, always would be, was nowhere to be seen. None of my friends were. But what did I expect? This had been my decision. I had always been fully aware of the consequences. I knew what would happen I just didn’t know it would hit me so hard, hurt so badly. That the emptiness I would feel would be so consuming.

Now I was alone, or so it seemed. My friends were gone. Even my enemies were gone. Who knew I could even miss good old “Bab Cuff”, as he liked to call himself. My dad, the one person who would ever talk to me or even look at me when I was a child, wouldn’t even talk to me. Even those select few people I was getting to know could not yet be considered a permanent part of my life yet. Yes. If being alone was defined as “ the only person you were truly able to count on was yourself” I was, indeed, alone.

Tears came to me again and I crawled into the bottom of my closet with a blanket. I wished there was someone to talk to, but no one was around. I usually spent most of the day by myself on Thursdays. Thursday. That meant tomorrow would be the beginning of the last weekend before I officially became the new kid. Again.

New. New school, new people, new teachers, new classes,. Nothing was the same and that better word change pinched me again, making my stomach twist. I couldn’t even remember why was doing this, but it was too late to go back. My decisions were final. A new chapter of my life was started. How I wished for an eraser. I wished things., people, I wished I could stay the same.

This was going to be hard. Suddenly I desperately wished I had some Nyquil. (So many wishes that would never come true.) Yes, drug abuse is of course bad, but sometimes you just needed to sleep, to disappear. It really couldn’t be that bad for you if it kept you sane. I curled up tighter into my corner, as if I could melt away into the ugly, speckled carpet, and I sat.

I sat for what seemed like hours. Then I was done being sad. I was done pitying myself. I knew I needed to grow up and face the world like a big girl no matter how hard I thought it had punched me in the face. Grow up, I told myself again and again (as if that would help).

So many things were different and new, so many things scared me. (Grow up.) But I really had had an amazing summer. All the laughs, the last reunion with my old life. The late nights, the adventures. All the many, many more reasons to be sad about the summer’s end.

I was thankful, though. Thankful that I had gotten the chance to do the things I had. No regrets. No turning back. Grow up. I bit my lip to so I would have a more physical pain to focus on. One that I could understand instead of letting tears slip. Grow up. Grow up, grow up.

I finally decided to listen to myself, and got up and out of the closet. I turned to the window, wondering how, yet somehow knowing I would be ok. (Or at least hoping I would be.) The world hadn’t fallen from the sky, or at least I hadn’t realized it yet, and that was good. I still needed the blanket, and I wished it would rain so I would know I wasn’t the only sad thing in the universe, but there wasn’t a cloud in sight. Instead I looked around outside and it was beautiful. Everything was green, as if summer had just begun. Beautiful. And the sun was setting, one more time.

Me, As A Writer

Every one has the potential to be a writer, some better than others, but all posses the basic qualities needed to write. Some learn to write at an early age. Yet with illiteracy becoming a growing epidemic we are slowly losing the ability to think for ourselves, to create what has never been, to inspire the world. Once there were great writers in the world. The question is where have they gone?


I learned to write at an early age. I remember knowing how to spell my whole family’s names at the age of three. While my mom decorated my third birthday cake I “helped” her carefully spell out each frosting letter on the giant red ladybug. Even by then I knew how to sing, memorize, use full sentences, read Dr. Suess stories. That must have been when I learned to love to read, because I have loved it ever since. Silly things like red and blue fish amused me, and later I consumed page after page of our home library. But it didn’t seem to be enough. I wanted to be the creator. I wanted to write brilliant things that deprived other people of sleep when they were drawn too deep even to breath into an alluring tale. Unfortunately, I have never become half so brilliant as I would have like to have been.

But I tried. I spent hours pouring my heart out into notebook after notebook. I kept a pen on me at all times, left a notebook under my pillow to jot down those brilliant thoughts that crept upon me in those too common sleepless hours. With all the practice and all the time invested into those lines one would think I had come up with at least a decent page or two. I don’t recall ever doing so, although I did learn to love to write.

English became a favorite subject of mine sometime during the seventh grade when an assignment was given on Lewis and Clark in Social Studies. (And I know, Social Studies isn’t English.) Instead of actually doing the assignment a friend and I wrote a quite delightful poem on the horrors of history in a dreaded room thirteen, Mr. Robert’s classroom. Our friends all seemed to love it and Mr. Roberts thought it quite accurate. It was the first poem I ever composed.

I’m not a poet. I don’t write well. But it has never stopped me. Anything I ever had to say that I couldn’t share with anyone could be written down and, if needed, later torn. Lists were composed containing all the wishes I had for my life, all the memories I’d made with my friends. I even tried to keep a journal, on several occasions. Which I never could (I don’t have half the dedication or desire to keep up on a journal). Pencils could be found In every pocket of every pair of jeans I owned and little purple pens accumulated under my pillows. My best work was more than likely found in the margins of math assignments and in books I’d been reading or torn pages out of. Sitting down to write never worked out well for me. Instead, I got ideas while completely preoccupied with other things like school or work. I still take notes if I have an interesting thought in the middle of the day or during a math quiz.

Even though I loved to scribble little thoughts down, I have never liked to share my work with others. I can stand in front of a class and tell everyone who killed who and who did what about any book. I can tear my way through any writing assignment and give some made up opinion to any report. And pass the assignment. One of my favorite things about writing is that you really don’t have to know a thing, you only have to be creative. That is, after all, what writing is all about. To pass any English class all you have to do is be original and do the work at least half decently. The only thing that is required of anyone to be a good writier is the write what isn’t and has never been and a good writer is born.

I am not a good writer. But writing is a wonderful, universal, thing. Each of us can be writers if we try. Including me.