Every year, when all the older kids were off for exams, our school ran activity days for the younger kids. There were craft classes you could do at the school, or sometimes trips to the cinema or museum, but the main event was always the trip to a theme park. My parents couldn’t afford for me to go there though, but my friends could, so I found myself stuck in school doing papercrafts with a bunch of younger kids that I didn’t know. And G.
G was in my year since primary and seemed to have learning difficulties of some kind, although nobody ever spoke about it. It was just something in the way he spoke and went on. Most people awkwardly avoided him, which couldn’t have been easy for him, but whenever he spoke to me, it made me feel really uncomfortable. I could never figure out why. I thought I was just a bad person.
It occurred to me recently that I think I’ve maybe repressed a memory or something….I can’t be sure, but it kinda feels like I have. Like there’s something that I’m missing. I thought that my anxiety and depression just stemmed from the fact that I had an unhappy childhood, which my parents have always refused to acknowledge. My parents hated each other and constantly fought, but “stayed together for the kids” I was bullied a lot and had only 1 proper friend before the age of 10 because I’ve always been very shy, socialising can be very difficult for me and she moved away a year after we became friends. It just doesn’t feel like that’s the whole story though. Something in my gut tells me there’s something else.
I remember way back in primary, I couldn’t have been older than around 7, after morning break or lunch (I can’t remember which) a load of kids in my class, mostly boys, were all around me laughing and yelling that I had been kissing G in the playground. I said it wasn’t me. They laughed even more and kept yelling it, they wouldn’t take no for an answer. It was definitely me, they saw me on the ground with him, kissing him. I kept saying it wasn’t me, I had literally not the faintest idea what they were talking about, no recollection, but they were just so damn insistant! Then G said it was me as well, and it didn’t matter what I said after that.
For years afterwards, all the way up into high school, people I went to primary with would occassionally say they remembered it and laugh all over again. Even people that I didn’t know had heard the story from other people. I still was adamant that it hadn’t been me.
Then, years later on activity day when all my friends were away, I found myself going home on a school bus that was almost empty except for the driver, me, G and 2 younger girls. I sat right at the front, hoping nobody would speak to me. The girls got off at the same stop and a minute or 2 after that G came and sat on the seat across the aisle from me.
I can’t remember what he was saying, I just remember that suddenly he was sitting right next to me and I was pressed against the wall trying to ignore him but he just kept moving closer. Then he tried to take my hand from my leg and I pulled it away and stood up, moving towards the driver so I could get off 3 stops earlier than I needed to. Just as the bus was stopping, G said to me, and this is the only thing I remember him saying “I’d appreciate it if you didn’t tell anybody what just happened.” I wish I could remember what it was that he had been saying…
There’s has to be a reason that being around him made me feel uncomfortable even before the bus happened, right? There was a reason I was nervous from the minute I got on that bus and saw he was there. A reason why I instinctively didn’t want to be left alone with him? And there must be a reason that so many people have this memory of me that I have no recollection of, right?
So many questions now, but the one that I keep coming back to like a broken record, over and over, is…if I was the one kissing him then why would I just forget that? What the hell happened here?