I don't know if I heard or read this somewhere, or if I just came up with it on my own, but a statement has been floating around my head for a while now: "It takes a special person to look to the future for light when the present and the past are so dark."
Does that mean I'm special, then? I don't know. What I do know is that hope has gotten me through some pretty dark times. Maybe it was naive of me, but I remember months passing when I would lay down to bed at night and promise myself, "It will be better tomorrow. Someone will notice, someone will ask, someone will let me cry. Someone will see the cuts or the scars or the way I massage my barely-covered shoulders. Someone will have the heart to give me what I don't have enough will left to ask for." It was what I saw when I looked back that prompted me to say, "An old adage says that where there's life, there's hope, but it's been my experience that where there's hope, there's life," and credit it to my pen name and post in on the wall of my junior-year English classroom.
There was a time in my life where it took every ounce of willpower, coupled with thoughts of my little sisters and my parents and the fact that I could not worry them, to get out of bed every morning. It took me an hour to talk myself into getting up, an hour to convince myself that I could make it one more day, that Joey would smile at me and take my hand, or Axel would be there with his "drug-money" to buy me a soda, or Smitty would have a bar of chocolate in her purse saved just for me. It never got me down that none of that ever happened; I just told myself that it gave me a better chance for the next day.
Once I was officially out of bed and on my way to getting out the door and making the bus, my way to keep going was the fact that I didn't want to trouble my parents to have to drive me to school. At school, breaking down would lead to being sent to the counselor's office, which would lead to the story coming out, which would lead to one of my parents coming to school, which meant inconvenience for them, and I didn't want that to happen, so nothing would happen at school. Back at home, head to my room, lock the door, watch Buffy or Doctor Who or Sherlock, or read something, and get lost in a world that doesn't exist. Then it would be dinner and chores and sleep and do it all again tomorrow, still while constantly thinking, "It'll get better tomorrow. It'll get better tomorrow."
So if it takes a special person to do that, then I suppose I am special. To quote my (marvelous) junior high social studies teacher, "There's more than one definition of the word 'special,' Dillon."
