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Date Posted: 12:37:59 04/04/02 Thu
Author: March Hare
Subject: From January 5, 2002

I'd appreciate very much to have input on this piece. Suggestions, comments, do I sound like an ignorant idiot? Please let me know.


A character:

I look around me and see all these other people, normal people, and I wonder what it is like to be them. I want to casually come up behind a friend and begin a conversation with, "Hey, how's it going?" But that will never happen. I'll never walk and whenever I try to say something my lips issue an ugly dissonant sound. Would a friend--if I had one--be embarrassed if I wheeled up beside her and casually began a conversation with a pained, "Uugh?" I'm sure she would.
I know what I look like--my legs and arms withered with atrophy, my healthy torso disproportionately round to them, my head to one side with an expression of blankness forever scarred upon it. But if they looked at my eyes, would they see that there is an intelligent rational being in my disfigured body? They would if they looked--well, not my right eye, that one drifts to the far side and makes my face all the more grotesque. But no one looks at my eyes. It's rude. I'm retarded after all. Even the nurse won't look me in the eye, she's embarrassed to. And if they only realized that even though I look incoherent, almost drunk in my way, I hear and understand everything they say, even if I can't respond to it.
Sometimes I hear my parents talk about me when I'm right there. They don't believe I can think either. They talk about what I know and what I don't know, what to do with me, what the doctors say. And I know the answers: "I know and understand everything, I know the solutions to your problems, all I can do is think!"
But I can't shout them out. I can't move by myself, let alone reveal the secrets I know. Because I think I've learned the secret to life. It is simply to live. The tragedy is that I'm the only person in my world who sees this, and the only one incapable of doing so.

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