Grim Return

Everyone has traditions. Sometimes it is family trips to a favorite venue other times, it is at-home rituals that they’d feel wrong if they missed the chance. For me, it is traveling to a place called Covina and then returning from whence I came. As far as introductions go, you may refer to me as Adam, which means the first man in Hebrew or something to that effect. There isn’t much to tell of how I came to be, but rather the return pattern. The place seems insignificant to anyone else, yet so much more for me. As I hear the click-clack of train wheels, memories of childhood flood back to me once more. Every year I make it a point to return here once in Summer and the second in Winter. Sometimes I even have the company of others to show them around. This time I travel alone before long, the still recognizable part of town where the locomotive stops primarily unchanged for decades comes into view. With just a backpack of snacks, I disembark the vehicle and step outside. I always knew the same old dealership as a kid. It is empty of cars like someone abandoned it years ago yet still a relic of a bygone era. Continuing about my way downtown, I note the changes that have happened concerning what is still around.

The Hobby Shop is still there. The local game retailer and even the Japanese Restaurant appear unchanged since the 1990s, saving a few fresh paint jobs. I pass by my old elementary school to see it is blue instead of red as it was when I was growing up. The mascot is different too; instead of a teddy bear, it is now a panther. I can see from afar the playgrounds that were once hell for me on a bad day and purgatory on a good one. In my day we had a thing called Recess. It was a time for children outside of a structured setting to get some extra exercise. It was expected that children would want to play with each other eventually, but I was that kid always playing by myself. It wasn’t that others didn’t try to play with me; I just didn’t have any interest as I’d casually observed how some were when it came to winning and losing and presumed just about everyone felt the same way. Looking back on it, I probably had the right idea. I had more than my share of teachers who just didn’t get me. It was hard enough not to snap at them when already awake at an hour that I’d rather be asleep, but mix that with children who were probably developmentally typical for their age yet annoying to me all the same despite the fact I was their age.

One day a recess monitor we’ll call her Ms. Roberts had enough of me playing by myself, and so she told me, “I need to see you playing with someone.”

I replied, “I don’t want to play with others; they’ll beat me at something, make fun of me, and then I’ll get angry. If I get angry, I’ll get in trouble.”

“Play with others, or there’ll be trouble.”

“Fine, but don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

Sure enough, my worst fears came true, and I got in trouble with the recess lady, which then was reported to my less than a sympathetic teacher at the time; we’ll call her Ms. Young.

“Get in trouble out there; you get in trouble in here!”

So, I received my penalty as it were and grew to loathe physical activity of any kind. It is more than likely a contributing factor to why I’m fat these days besides my love of sweets. Even as an adult, I have a stress response when I’m overloaded or someone happens to trigger something from my memories. Similar to one with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, I can get flashbacks or respond erratically to certain stimuli, but it has to do with people more than sounds. Especially people who remind me of the teachers I had, the kids in the schools I attended, or anything else that sticks to one if they take everything at face value in the most literal way possible. When in such a state, I sometimes forget what triggered it but just remember repeatedly yammering, swears, or declarations of various aliases I use online to vent my anger. As I look at others around me, I interpret their concern as fear of me. It is like I am a monster that ought to be locked up in an asylum. They may be right to think that way. While I’m usually very kind to others, despite the hand I’d been dealt, my coping mechanisms have not been completely effective on their own. Were we in a less tolerant era of history, I may well have lost my job years ago if not locked up like that. It’s stressful and repetitive living the way I do.

Whenever I get up to begin my daily routine, I have to almost obsessively scan my pockets and surroundings for every possible item I could forget at home, lest I run out and realize what is gone halfway to work. Then when I manage to get to work, I take orders, process payments, bag food, clean surfaces, rinse and repeat until break time and the end of my shift. There is both a comfort and boredom associated with such repetitive work, so I’ve made it a habit to sometimes sing to myself as I work or subtly hum a favorite tune. Funnily enough, even my favorite songs have at least one line that repeats three or more times throughout a two-minute track.

As I leave the school before anyone gets suspicious of my intent, I ponder why I make this triggering journey not once but twice a year and have for many years. When I brought others, I convinced myself it was a chance to market myself since I’ve written books that occur here, but now that I come here alone, even knowing no one is waiting for me, it can’t be that.

“Are you okay?”

I snap from my mental trance of thoughts to find myself outside a coffee shop. Seems I’d forgotten the time or direction I’d been going amid the internal monologue.

“I am okay; I was just taking in the scenery here.”

Embarrassed, I walk into the shop and order a blended beverage without coffee, which isn’t met with the sort of expression one might think if they realized the place catered to people who liked coffee and those who do not like it indiscriminately with their mixed beverages. Sitting upon the table outside, as I sip my sugar-filled frosted drink, my mind wanders once more, but at least I don’t look particularly awkward now. Once more, I question what in the world I’m doing there. Everything fun to do is closed until further notice, just a few retail shops here and there. I remember the frustration others had trying to teach me skills I have since left to rust. J never was able to legibly write in cursive nor seem to keep me organized despite exhausting nearly every filing system other people proposed for me. If I fail to do such simple things despite repeated instruction, perhaps the answer is a mental block, and if I maintain this routine, the solution to resolve it will come. Wishful thinking, but this world never made much sense to me, logically speaking. So, is it really so unreasonable to think the answer will just come to me if I do the journey enough times to the places of failed learnings and other associative feelings of ill?

The cup ran dry, and I resumed walking about the place and came upon a mostly abandoned park. I grow lost in thought again as in my head the police and fire safety fair appear with many free and fun games geared towards educating one what to do in various emergency situations. Then it vanishes to be replaced with a car show and models I couldn’t possibly repeat the name of to you but clearly showed their age to anyone who was an expert on them. Coming to my senses once more, I see only emptiness. Ever since great darkness threatened every part of the world, no matter where one lived, you’d think you were in a zombie apocalypse. Though a sad sight to behold, I finally have a place I can reflect in peace. Some find such a journey meaningful because they can reunite with others they might have moved away from, but not me. Even were the world not threatened, as far as the few I did manage to reconnect briefly with on social media knew I was here one day and disappeared the next.

The school that I wound up to before moving away is gone. It was closed down and replaced a decade or two ago. Good riddance! Whose bright idea was it to have an elementary school, a middle school, and a high school on the same campus with behaviorally different people than average? That said, while I consider it a victory I transferred out before that happened, I hope the people who really needed it didn’t wind up in jail as adults. I may not particularly like what they’d done to me all those years ago, but I’ve realized with age that they had needs that weren’t being met and problems I could never know. With that last thought, the answer seems clear as day. The purpose of making the journey to a traumatic place isn’t to desensitize me to what had happened all those years ago but to never forget my origins. That no matter what successes or failures may come my way, none of them could have been without somewhere to have called home years and years ago. I had yet to realize this meaning at the time, but looking back, it all makes sense. We remember our history not to celebrate past mistakes but learn from them and remember how far we’ve come in our darkest hour.

I saw a reflection of myself as a kid in front of me. He is angry, vindictive, hurt. How could this world be so cruel? He just wanted to be left alone, but still, others granted him little peace. I reach out to hug him but feel only air.

Nevertheless, the sentiment seems to be understood. My actions have done what words could not. With each attempt to hug, my reflection becomes older with different struggles, yet I remember precisely what they represent, for it is a part of me. Once my last reflection vanishes and reality comes back, I feel a moist sensation under my eyes, not rain, but tears. As a person may observe wakes every year for a loved one or just visit their grave, it seems that the same effect can happen in the death of one’s past. The final form really stuck with me, for it was a vision of the last time I’d ever competed at anything. As age came around and losses and a small number of wins racked up, I found myself needing to escape a place if losing was too much. People just seemed to expect me to let it go and do as is customary and shake my opponent’s hand. I’d been told that it was only a game or contest, but when you grew up being told winning was all that mattered, and you took it literally to what extent is the self to blame? One doesn’t just snap out of the habit. It is because of that that I’d eventually grown too disillusioned to compete at anything again. At that moment, I might have been okay to have lost had I not been the only one of my gender to have. Still, since all my competitors had 3 years on me in the same course for which awards were issued, I felt cheated by that, and it a sick joke they even bothered nominating me, and I’d had any hope whatsoever. It was rigged against me, and if I’d known, I’d never have shown up.

Even that was over a decade ago, so I have two questions yet unanswered, “If I lose have I outgrown the childish tendency to get upset over it?” If I win, “What will the result say about how far I have come?” Only one way to find out; take the plunge and enter this contest.