Zee Blog

Looking to the past

So today I've finished the piece I think will round out my bit on childhood for the "Submit Your Body to Marooned" contest. It's due this Friday, so I have tonight and tomorrow to polish it to a shine.

I was sitting outside of my English 200 room before class writing it, listening to my iPod.

I could feel the emotion on my face as I wrote it, and every time I looked up from the page some of the girl's from my class were giving me a look like: "What is he writing that is making him so sad" or "Maybe we should ask him to leave any weapons at the door".

It was hard, yet easy all at the same time to write the piece. These little snippets have been one of the easiest to write in the sense that I can sit down and easily write it from start to finish.

Yet, it is incredibly painful to write because I have to try and place myself back into that period of time. These pieces, although milestones in my own mind, occured almost every day of the week. Sometimes there would be breaks in the insanity. Life wasn't too bad until I was 13. Yet, from 13 till about 17 life was a living Hell. I think it was because at 13 I became fully aware of all that was going on, what it meant, what it was doing to us all, and realiziing just how helpless I was to escape it at the time.

A part of me actually fear releasing these pieces. What if they get published? What does that mean for my parents? Granted, it helps me heal, and at the same time they DID do these things. Yet, I know my parents are not bad people. They just made mistakes.

My mother, for all her faults, was the first female Paramedic in Chicago. She was also the first female Paramedic of the Year. She had to be let go on disability after an unruly patient caused her to slip on the stairs, the patients weight being two or three of me, causing three to four of the discs in her back to shatter. The discs, unfortunately, were not the only thing to shatter within my mother that day.

My father is still a Fire Fighter, and works with the Air National Guard. He is a Senior Master Sergeant, head boom operator, navigator, and also one of the Chief Medical Officers. My dad is defined by his work, even if he buries himself in it. I have a picture of my dad when he was a Fire Fighter in Chicago umpteen years ago. It's him on an extension ladder like you might find at Home Depot, but he is crawling on all fours across it as it spans the rooftop of a building something like fourty stories up trying to get to a trapped family.

A part of me wants to be so angry at them. To sit and spend every ounce of my being trying to get it published so I can be like, "Ha! How do you like that?" Yet, there is an equal part of me that says, "The past is past. It's not going to make any of those memories go away."

Oh well. Write more stuff later.