Something to Think About (standard:other, 578 words)
Author: Julia McGinty	Added: Oct 04 2001	Views/Reads: 3460/3	Story vote: 0.00 (0 votes)
A reflection of the lasting effects of childhood events...

These days, when I look back, I realise that I haven’t changed. Maybe
the world’s changed around me, and I’ve learned more about a lot of 
things, but I haven’t really changed. Just developed, I suppose you 
could say. Developed into the person I am today, but essentially the 
same stuff is still inside me. The same blood’s running through my 
veins, my brains are still made out of the same grey matter, and many 
of the same thoughts still run through my head. They’re just developed 
thoughts now - taken from adolescent naivety and cultivated, watered, 
and fertilised until they became full-blown comprehensions of what’s 
actually happening in my life. 

Most people seem to find that, over time, their memory fades away,
andthey’re only left with the particularly vivid bits - just fragments 
of the whole picture. But me, I can remember so many things so clearly, 
even when I’ve tried so hard to forget them. Like the time in the Art 
Room where Alex Jennings asked me if I was a pimp, just because my 
friends were all girls. That’s stuck in my memory like a spud in an 
exhaust pipe - it just sits there and waits for someone to turn on the 
ignition, to mention a crucial word which could bring everything 
flooding back, so it can explode and give the driver a hell of a 
fright. Or the time that my father called to wish me happy birthday, 
but he called a month early. Maybe he was only a teenager when I was 
born, and couldn’t handle the responsibility, but he could at least 
remember I’m alive. That was my thirteenth birthday, and I haven’t 
heard from him since. But, I suppose, what man would want a son like me 
anyway? As my mother’s told me thousands of times, I was an accident. A 
pure accident, and I would have been aborted, except her parents had 
made her keep me, to teach her a lesson. So I exist because of my 
mother’s irresponsibility. 

That’s one of my matured thoughts. I realise that now - the truth about
my existence. When I was younger I believed I existed because I was 
meant to be here, because I had something great to do on this earth. 
Now I realise that that’s just my childhood naivety popping up again. 
When you’re young, you can tell yourself things like that because you 
believe you have the answers to everything. But then you grow up and 
realise how many things you don’t know, and suddenly everything you do 
know becomes clearer. Do you know what I mean? It’s like, the sudden 
realisation of your own ignorance leads you to cling on to things that 
you do know, so you study them. You take them apart and turn them 
inside out and put them back together and smell them and taste them and 
feel them - until you know that they’re true. You just know. 

So now I know a few things. It might not be much, and it might not be
very intelligent, but it’s all I’ve got, really. When you don’t get to 
interact with other people very much, what do you have except the 
thoughts inside your head? They may not always be rational, or very 
good conversation, but they’re something to hang on to when half the 
people you know are pushing you off a cliff, and the other half are 
just watching you fall.


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