Saturday, December 1, 2007

To a Deep Regret

I wrote a poem once, "To a Deep Regret", that was about my extreme sense of guilt over the smallest and most insignificant of things. Of course, in the poem it was about me beating up my sister, making her cry, and then feeling really badly about it. My twelve-year-old self did not like feeling like a bully, so she tried to make up for it by hugging her sister (ten at the time) and saying she loved her and offering to play her stupid board game after all. Of course, this was not included in the poem. After that time though, I never bruised my sister again, and all our arguments became verbal. Honestly, I have not been in a fist fight since then.

I remember once walking to a Foster's Freeze when I was fourteen, and buying food. All my dad wanted was a chocolate banana shake. So i ordered it after my sister and I had eaten and we walked home. On the fifth stair to our apartment i dropped it, frantically grabbing at it while dread krept into my body through my hair follicles (it's preferred mode of entry) and slid menacingly down my spine, making my fumbling hands even more numb and useless. I watched the drink fall between the steps and splat! on the ground beneath me. I almost cried. This was the only thing my dad had asked for, and i ruined it. and he hadn't even given me enough to go back and buy another one without him knowing. With the heaviest of hearts I trudged into the apartment and he looked up from the couch, where he was carving a piece of wood into a small wolf. Instantly i felt like it would have been better to just throw myself off of our porch, and hope I died when I landed.
"I'm so sorry dad, i just dropped your shake right outside, i tripped on the stairs. Can I go back and get you another one?"
"No, don't worry about it, it's not a big deal."
But to me, it was a big deal. I could see his disappointment. He may have said it was fine, but i knew he was thinking "all i wanted was a shake, and she couldn't even get that. She dropped it, and I was really looking forward to drinking it."
I grounded myself for a week, and stuck to it. I didn't go anywhere but school, and I did not go to the football game Thursday or Friday night. I began practicing to be more graceful. I did not take the stairs at a jog ever again, even when it was freezing outside and i wanted to get home.

Another time in my youth, it had to be when i was eleven, my sister and I were playing in my brother's room. He was seventeen, and had already began staying at his girlfriends house most of the time. In his room was this huge poster, made by his guardian angel. You see, he was on the football team, and at our high school each starting player had a guardian angel that washed his uniform, cleaned his cleats, made posters to put around the school for people to show him support, and every morning before the game would leave a small gift basket with food, candy, and small girly things like stuffed animals with his number on them. Usually the players gave these to their girlfriends. Guardian angels were completely anonymous, so the girlfriends were never really jealous. If a player found out who his angel was, she was immediately replaced. It was a very exciting tradition.
Anyway, My sister and I were in his room, and he had a poster on his wall that said "Go, Shaun, GO!" and while we were sitting on his couch that pulled out into a bed (he said it made it more like an apartment, his own place.) she found a lighter. Being nine and eleven, we immediately decided to light a small piece of paper on fire. Another one of my stupidest moments: For some reason I decided using a hole-puncher on someone's hair would put a hole in it. The result was an angry person who had a chunk of hair close to his scalp. I digress, but that is just too entertaining to think about. After we lit the paper on fire, we decided to light other things on fire. Including, a cup, which didn't work, a CD, which only turned blackish, and a pillow. The pillow smoldered, but no flames. So paper is that would burn, and the biggest piece of paper was the poster. She lit a small corner of it... the bottom corner. The flame instantly grew to almost a foot, and her response was to blow it out. You know what that did. Big fire. So, i grabbed the still smoldering pillow and Whack! Whack! Whack! until the fire was out. the result was a brown edged poster that now said "aun, GO!" and a very large brown sooty spot on the wall where the poster used to stand. For this my idea was a paint scraper. After realizing that the really white powdery substance underneath was not what a wall was supposed to look like, we left it alone. Looking at the scene, I remember wishing i was on fire, so that my brother would not care about the poster. Because if he didn't care, then i wouldn't be to blame. And if it wasn't my fault, then I didn't have to feel bad about it.

In case it seems more like a feeling of fear of punishment, know that my parents never punished me for anything, never imposed any rules, other than the dating one, and generally were not interested in how I grew up or how I turned out. When I didn't want to go to school they said okay, but would not call in for me. When I didn't do my homework they simply said, "it's your future, I can't make you do something I didn't do." After sixth grade I went unless I was really sick, and I did as much homework as I could remember to do.
Another proof of the lack of fear is that on one occasion i did cry. I was twenty, and I had gone to my storage space to find some papers for a portfolio for class. I Had crawled around over boxes and furniture, sorted through almost everything there was, and not found them. I was about to leave when i stepped over a box and onto a table, not realizing a single glass vase was standing on the edge of it. The table shook a little, and the vase fell and shattered on the floor. As i cleaned it up I cried because it had been so beautiful, and someone had made it, and now it was gone forever. I cried at the loss of beauty, the loss of history, over something like that. A broken vase, that was one of millions just like it.

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