I Sat Down to Write Morning Pages and Juanita Popped Out

I've decided that the best way to get back to writing is to just do it, so here I am with my morning coffee prepared to knock your socks off with whatever comes out of my brain at eight in the morning after the fitful sleep of a dedicated insomniac. Huzzah!

This is what I'm looking at right now, cats and coffee:



I woke up this morning with a memory running in a loop in my brain of this kid that I knew for a short while in elementary school. I think her name was Juanita. She showed up part way through grade six, and she was all legs and the whites of her eyes. She had wiry, black hair that waved around her head with static electricity. It wafted up to metal doorframes and out to coats on hooks and gravitated toward neighbouring students. Her hair seemed to be having a conversation with everything it could touch.

I was a tiny kid, so her hair never managed to settle against even the top of my head. It was too awkward for me to reach up and touch it, so I was left to watch it go about its business and imagine how its coarseness would feel pressed between my thumb and forefinger.

I found her compelling. Her eyes darted around constantly, taking in everything but the person she was talking to, which made it feel impossible to pin her down. When she spoke to me, it felt as though she were talking around the space that I represented. I wasn't always sure that she was aware it was me and not some other person standing there in the spot around which her eyes arced.

Maybe it was this mix of messages, that she would usher me in with her stories yet reject me with her eyes, that made me want to bend her into a friendship with me, but I did my best to make it happen. I positioned myself by her coat hook in the morning and after school and bumped into her in the bathroom. I stood nearby at recess and watched her arms dart around her while she told outrageous stories to other kids about her life. The stories were almost surely all lies, but I didn't care. They outstripped anything I had to say about life on my suburban crescent.

One day, while I was watching her flurry of talk in the hallway, she suddenly looked right at me, and I mean right at me, like right-in-my-eyes at me, and she said "I could come to your house sometime."

I nearly swooned. The destiny I had felt from the first time she had been delivered into our class had arrived. We would be like sisters. I knew it. I imagined us together at my house. Maybe we would listen to the radio or talk about kids at school. I didn't care what we did, really. In my mind, the picture of us together was always of us laughing. We were dear to each other.

I was anxious when, the next day, Juanita wasn't at school. I had screwed up my courage to ask over to my house, and the essential part of my friendship equation wasn't there. She wasn't there the day after that, either. On the third day, when I passed her coat hook and saw that there was still no coat on it, I panicked. I waited until recess to ask the teacher if she knew what was up.

"Juanita's not going to this school anymore," the teacher said.

"But she just got here. Why'd she leave?"

"Juanita went to live with a different family," the teacher said, "and she has special needs that another kind of school can help her with."

"She has special needs?"

"Her brain isn't quite the same as yours and mine. It doesn't work the same way."

My brother had special needs, but his were physically obvious, and he couldn't speak. This information about Juanita was news to me, because it hadn't occurred to me that you could have a disability that couldn't be seen. It kind of made sense of a few things, though, when I mulled it over. I mean, what physically able kid in grade six can't tie their own scarf? And I was always having to tell her what words to use, because she would get lost in the middle of sentences trying to think of them. Also, every other time she tried to go to class, she couldn't find the room and had to be walked there.

It turns out that there is sometimes a fine line between being a manic pixie dream girl like the characters that Zooey Deschanel plays so well and being a person with special needs in the way that insinuates your mother drank too much and wrecked your brian in utero.

I was sad that I wouldn't get to actually be friends with Juanita now, or see her skinny arms jab at the air, or imagine the crunch of her hair as I watched it float around her head. It seemed so at odds with my sense of a linear reality that someone could be there and then be gone. It was like someone had taken scissors and cut her right out of the air.

That night I prayed fervently that Juanita would remember me and her brain would get better and her new family would be kind and keep her for a long time. I hope they did.

Don't Let The Personal Confession Bit Scare You

Yesterday, C, an old, old friend of mine from twenty-one years ago, showed up at my work, browsing through merchandise. I had forgotten that I had run into her a couple of years before in this slough of bureaucracy that I have now joined, so her sudden appearance struck me with anxiety. C and I became friends when I moved to this province in grade three. We were inseparable. We walked to school together, had sleepovers, spent every recess with each other, and she was even my first kiss. Then, in grade five, and third girl joined us. E had recently moved to the city, and we quickly became a trio, but this was not to last long. Both C and E began vying for my time alone away from the other, which created mounting tensions until one day, C and I came to school to find that no one would speak a word to us. E had used her influence to effectively have C and I shunned. For the first two weeks of the shunning, C and I clung to each other and spent hours talking it over, trying to figure out why this was happening and what E had told everyone to convince them of this course of action. It was terrible, but we at least had each other. Then, (and I’m sure you know what came next), I came to school one morning to find that I had been utterly abandoned. C had joined with E and the others and would speak not one word to me. Now I had no one, and the terrible silence perpetrated by my classroom continued for the rest of my grade five year. A couple of weeks after C had left me, she approached me in the library to apologize, saying that she had to do it, or she would still be like I was, friendless. Cold comfort. I became suicidal, I kept to myself, and I stayed away from those who tried to get closer to me. It was one of the worst times of my life. At the end of the school year, C moved to another part of the city and went to a new school for grade six, so I only saw her once after that. My parents and I were driving somewhere, and I looked out the window at one point to see C helping to wash a car. She was wearing the yellow, flowered sundress that I envied. I remember that car ride like emotional memory flashbacks in movies where everything is soundless and in slow motion. At that moment, I knew that even though I had moved on and made new friends, I missed her. And I understood what she had done. Anyway, back to seeing her at my work..... It was so unexpected, there she was, and I didn’t know if she recognized me at all, but I think she did, so I went all dorky and tried to keep my eyes averted, as though my not seeing her would aid in her not seeing me, and I tried to keep myself on the other side of this large post, and even though I was on cash and couldn’t really avoid being seen too well, I managed to duck away just when she and her friend went up to buy something so that the other cashier would deal with it. All the while, I was trying to appear to be behaving normally and not at all schizoid. Why, you ask, would I go to such lengths after all these years? Because even though I forgave her and moved on, I would rather not have to ever confront any remnants of that reality in my present life. But she works in the same building! I must deal with this. Next time, I’ll try maturity.

On to less personal-confessiony type things..... What is a “drop-kick murphy”? Does anyone know? I overheard it in a conversation at a bar yesterday, so it could be a drink..... Oh, skip it. I can’t believe I've never heard of them. They’re a band that’s been around for years. Check them out. They’re apparently quite good.

Grade Five Facts and Links:
* The Grade Five Syndrome.
* I used to love the school supply list. They were always printed on coloured paper for some reason, and the sight of this list would bring a rush of smells from my memory – fresh erasers, white glue, paper, and the ink from those erasable pens that were so popular back in 1982/83.
* My favourite elementary school names from Google searches: Little Tor, Strangel, Enchanted Lake, University, Lady of the Assumption, Avocado, Army Trail, Battleground, Richneck, Prettyboy, Fishkill, and my personal favourite, Hellgate.