SandScript 2022

Nothing is forever 8 .
Nothing ends 9 .
8 How did it end? Early in 2010, I was reviewing a DVD with a storyline about unrequited love. For reasons I will
never understand, it unleashed a flood of memories, which then unlocked all of the emotions I had not been feeling for most
of the decade. That process consisted of me becoming increasingly more emotionally erratic for a couple of weeks, which
meant laughing, crying, and becoming angry with no provocation whatsoever, until at the end I finally exploded into screaming
and weeping. I then sank to the bottom of the ocean and wanted to drown. I planned out my suicide and began a pattern
of self-harming, like cutting my chest with a knife and smashing my skull against a cement floor repeatedly, because I hated
myself for existing and wanted to shut off the unbearable anguish I felt. That lasted for most of the year, and then, gradually, I
became a different person. The person I was finally died, and I sloughed him off like a snake sheds its skin. I was not better or
worse, but different. I awoke from a deep sleep, and needed to start over, learning how to be around other people, all the way
from the beginning again. It felt like I had a long, long way to go.
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9 I remember the first day I finally decided to rejoin the world. In October 2010, I was waiting outside a neighborhood
center in South Tucson, where I would volunteer with at-risk elementary school children. The sun seemed painfully bright.
Everything seemed loud and unnatural. Yet something in me insisted that I be there, and to my surprise, I found I enjoyed
helping the kids. It couldn’t entirely fill the hole the depression left inside of me, but at least it soothed my newfound hunger
for connection. Now I was working with children, when before I couldn’t even be around other humans. By the end of 2011,
I was living in my own apartment and earning my rent and food money by going out to work every day. I did not become the
person I always wanted to be, because even now I am not him. But at least I wasn’t there, living in nothing, anymore. More
pain and horror would await me, but I did not know that then. Even when the horrors came, I did not go back there. I don’t
ever want to go back there.
Now I am here.
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