Witch Queen of Chermside

Reasons to Live & Reasons to Die

April 15 2006

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Holidays are soon and I won’t have to go to school.

I can leave the house and read in the park all day. I can pack sandwhiches and water and cans of coke and I won’t have to go back to the house. It’ll be like a little resort get away.

I will have to pick the books to read. I’ll pick a series. So I can get lost in a world for a long time. The same place each day. It will be fun, it will be quiet, it will be me alone.

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One day of school. The end of term is always a day of free for all. We’ll skip math in math and watch videos and history will be videos the whole afternoon is book for sports. They’ll make me play with the boys. Boys in this field, girls in that field. Bye bye to all my friends and all the boys will tell me I should go to the other field. I would love to but I’d stick out more. I’d stick out so much.

April 22 2006

Die

It easter so my dad has had half the week off. He asked where i’ve been going all day. I told him I was reading in the park.

“Don’t you have any friends to do things with?” he asks.

“I see them all term. I hardly get to read for fun when school is on.”

“It’s antisocial.”

“Anyway, most of them went away.”

He doesn’t have a comeback for that. He thinks that I have friends and they have gone on holidays. Better than him knowing the truth.

I wanted to stay in the park even when it got dark, but I had to go back. You can’t read in the dark and I didn’t want to be a conspicuous lone light in the dark of the park.

Live

Next wednesday my after school drama class would be back in session. They were the only people I had told about myself.

The class was run by a 20 year old drama major university student. She was short and immature looking that half the time she was just one of us, just the person organising a group of misfits to put on a play.

We were playing around of theatre sports, a stucture form of improvisation, and in it Janie, the teacher, had taken on the persona of a lesbian rock star. After the scene ended we were still joking about it and Janie said, I don’t think I could actually ever sleep with a woman, and being in the quick thinking theatre sports mode or take in and react without thinking, I just said “don’t worry neither can I.”

Everyone laughed, and Janie looked at me, surprised i’d said it out loud. I felt relieved. I’d felt safe and reasured and everyone just continued on the conversation as normal. I wasn’t any different. I was just more verbalised.

During the break the teacher came to me and had an obligitory conversation about whether I was ok. I was so happy I could honestly say I was. That was how my after school drama class become my escape from hiding.