Zero Hour

So this is it. The zero hour. I have to be there tomorrow at 5:45am... in other words, too frickin' early. I'll be in the hospital for 4 days. After tomorrow I'll no longer be just me. I'll suddenly be me + 1... what a strange thought. How do people deal with the sudden transition between only having themselves to take care of, themselves to think of, to having a whole other person who depends entirely on you for everything? I wonder what the person I will become would have to say to the person I am now. I hope that I like the new me.

--Dragon Read more!

Myself and Someone Like Me... Not Alone After All

This is in response to Thordora's August Pulsate Olympics. You can see the original post here.

This is the story of my first real friend.

I've moved more times in my life than some people two and three times my age. Most of the moves happened before I even turned 13. We were always on the move-- looking back, it's almost as if we were running from something. We never stayed long enough for me to make friends; when I did, we moved and I had to start all over. Eventually I just stopped trying. After my mom and dad divorced, however, the constant moving stopped. Then my mom married my stepdad, Russ, and we moved to a little town about 30 miles from Chico.

After we moved I was enrolled in the local junior high. It was all the same to me. One school was like any other-- a place filled with strangers I would never know. After a few weeks, people started to try and befriend me. I would smile and laugh with them, but I didn't bother getting too attached. One girl, Carleigh, was a lot of fun to be around, if you could get her away from her best friend, Amy, and her boyfriend. I had never met anyone more irritating in my life than this guy. His name was Matt. Anytime I would be talking to Carleigh he would appear out of thin air and interrupt the conversation. I absolutely could not stand him.

I hated riding the bus with the other kids, so I would catch a ride to school from my mom or Russ on their way to work every morning. This meant that I ended up getting to school around 6am. Most people didn't start arriving until about 7:30. That is, except one other person... Matt. We would sit on opposite sides of the cafeteria and refuse to look in the direction of the other person. It was like some sort of private feud.

The school we went to was adjacent to and shared a cafeteria with an elementary school. They had a teacher who would wait in the cafeteria for any kids who got dropped off early and provided activities to keep them busy until school started. I would talk to her sometimes about different things like books or school projects I was working on. On the day before the science fair, I brought in my science fair project. It was something involving using color and black and white film to take photographs. One was a black and white photo of my shadow on a creek.

We were talking about it and Matt came over and started commenting on my project. Wonder of wonders-- he really liked it. Eventually the teacher got busy setting up projects for the elementary school kids, and Matt and I continued talking. The conversation shifted from the science fair project to other things. We just kept talking and talking until the bell rang, and we were startled to find that we would be late to class. At some point during this conversation, we each realized that the other was not, in fact, a total nusiance. And so we became friends.

Every morning after that we would meet in the morning and spend the rest of the time until school started walking around talking or playing basket ball or tag when no one was around to laugh at us for being childish. We found out how much we had in common and how isolated we always felt compared to the other kids. But not anymore. For the first time in my life I had someone to talk to. And so, it seemed, did he.

The best part of this story: we are still friends today. In fact, he still has the picture of my shadow over the creek.

This is a picture of Matt last year in Iraq:



--Dragon Read more!