Winner - Junior Section

St Michael’s Collegiate

The rain pours out of the sky, swishing forwards, backwards, sideways. When the past repeats itself, we feel desperate and confused, wishing nothing had to occur twice. Right now, the past isn’t so much repeating itself, rather just daring that it will. I think it was her eyes.

I wander through the empty streets and through the midnight town, where I drift. Alone. I need to stop, to think. I can’t handle this.

As soon as I was born, I was made to feel huge. A burden on everyone. An elephant crammed in a room where it shouldn’t be, like the monster I became. But she was tiny. Adorable. Perfect.

Here is a metaphor for innocence: the little, pale, blue-eyed girl. The moment she was born, she was everything, filling all the space in between, but still never a burden, always as light as a feather. All my parents talked about, all they cared about. Already, I was a failure, six years old, and the worst behaved in my grade. Yeah, there were ‘issues’. They tried to fix me, turn me into the perfect little child my parents wanted me to be, the one they saw on TV that wore ponytails and played with her dolls. Key word: her. They never wanted a good for nothing, grotty, ugly, dumb little boy who by six still couldn’t write his own goddamn name.

And so obviously, I was nothing. And obviously, the cutest little blond-haired girl was everything. Maybe, at the time, to my little six-year-old self, it seemed reasonable. Maybe even right. When I took her out of her bassinet, I remember her little face looking up at me. I remember then knowing, deep down, that there was something wrong with what I was doing, even if I was too young to really know right from wrong. And I knew, I think, that I was bad. How I know now that I was bad, so bad. Or maybe I convinced myself of that after my parents told me constantly how I took away the only good thing they had in their lives. They told me I was nothing, a cold-blooded murderer. I didn’t know what that word meant until I went to school in grade one and asked my teacher, “What is a murderer, Miss?”    

I was sent home that day. They told my parents that they might want to get me checked out. They told the school what I’d done, and I was expelled. No school would want a boy like me at their school. If we are just a product of our environment, what would that mean for them? Perhaps that was one of the reasons, among many, my parents couldn’t stand looking me in the eye. Maybe they were afraid they’d see themselves looking back.

So, I grew up homeschooled, but not really learning. More a prisoner in my own home. But, one day I left. I rented an apartment on the east side of town where it was quiet. The silence was comfortable, and I liked it. My wife liked quiet too, or so she said. When she first came to live with me, we’d just sit around the table playing cards, silently. She didn’t ask me why she couldn’t meet my parents, or why I would stare at myself in the mirror for hours, looking for something hidden behind my eyes. She never asked me what I wrote in my black leather-bound diary. She still hasn’t. But the quiet is slipping away a little since I picked a career, settled down, made something of myself. Like a regular man. And the noise of the outside world, bit by bit, is streaming back in. But that’s okay because this time Amy, my wife, will hold my hand and look into my eyes, asking nothing and saying nothing. Just letting me know that it’s okay. She doesn’t know who I was, but maybe she need not know, only know who I am.

I changed; I became a regular man. I am now, right now, a regular man. I met a woman, made her my wife, and we had a perfect, beautiful, blue eyed little girl. Like a regular family would. Until one day, my wife said,

“Henry, do you want to name her after Christina? I think about her, and you back then, all the time you know. It was just so tragic. I mean, how could your parents have left her alone by the pool. And to think that you, my dear, were the one who found her…”

And so, I have a little girl called Christina who looks just like her. And I am deathly afraid. Am I still that boy? Within everyone, is the person we were as a child still hidden inside? Can we change?

That is why on this rainy evening I stand staring at the lamp post wondering whether I am just a regular man, or whether I am still that murderous, selfish, stupid little boy. If that boy is still curled up in the thorniest part of my heart, then I am not worthy of any of this. But maybe, we do change. Maybe we can change, with help, and if we are given the chance. Any of us, even the worst of us. Whatever that really means. Or, who knows, maybe sometimes evil is genetic, hardwired, always buried beneath the surface until it can’t bear to hide away anymore. Like a dirty secret.

So, the question is whether any of us change? Have you? Or maybe, the question is really this: will you?