The Girl Returns

She has burned all of her journals. All previous records of hesitation, frustration, the bleakest emotions or the brightest moments have been cast into the fire. It was never the right time to write for her. Only when asked to, because she thought, a middle class girl with no chance to see the world, no opportunity to live outside of a closet full of musty words and yesterday's ideas, she thought of her mind as the needle of a machine, perforating points along one seam, the same half inch stitch, with the precision of a drone. School was a conundrum for her, the formulas that worked effortlessly for all of her classmates-the classes, the halls, the noise, they did not have a fear of the marketplace. They savored the competition, crying mutiny at the misallocated percent or droopy B blotching the placid completion of a crystal white GPA. I was a failure, in my standards, and in theirs. I shrunk from the rat race, never raised a hand, never asked for help, always afraid, afraid of the guffaws, of the better than thou looks. Genius was coveted, to not know, was unspeakably shameful. The classroom was my battlefront, the eyes of my teachers, my classmates, enemies. They must have been a great deal more understanding than my imagining, but my imagining was not so. To me they were steel magistrates of some higher, indesputable judgment. I withered underneath their gaze, and yet it was not a gaze; they probably never thought of glancing. How different my education might have been had I been a part of their gilded league. And now, eighteen years old, too old to be so stupid. Learning all the things my peers learned one year, two years ago. And still the same frustrations, still the incompetency, still the fear of the marketplace. Why does noise frighten me? Why do crowds confuse me? Why can a professor, a sound speaker, lecture to a crowd of my peers and all of them comprehend with such depth and precision, and I sit there in ignominy trying to distinguish the matter, and, having not, fall farther behind? It would be too predictable to follow with this for some length mentioning my follies with psychiatrists and psychologists, the useless indulgence, the selfish attempt to propt up my confidence with professional applause: You're actually a very smart girl, we've even got a title for all of your problems, a real diagnosis, and here, here, take this shitty book with all these famous people that have been posthumously diagnosed with your problem as well. Wow, ma, Thomas Jefferson had Asperger's? That must make me pretty special! A precious waste of copays. Twenty twenty dollar copays. Every prescription. Every combination. My poor, poor parents. They wanted very much to cure the leper. So I played alive and well and living on more than one occasion. I've not known parents as loving as they are, with a child so frustrating and impossible. They deserve a happy ending. Its a very American thing to do, an American invention, if I'm not mistaken. The happy ending with a ship sailing off into the horizon, and we do not question what happens beyond the horizon but treasure how unique our sunset is this evening in our little city in the little state in the little country in the little hemisphere in the little world.