#i have a short story i wrote in middle school called scab | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

ever-flowing-creativity-blog · 7 years

Text

Tools of the Trade

we were meeting in a small gymnasium. That was in a rec center, across the street from an old worn down church, that was in dire need of a paint job. The gymnasium had hardwood floors that creaked in some sections. A fidgety man with greasy untamed hair, and sores on his arms, rocked back and forth causing the floor to creak beneath his chair. It was beyond annoying, but I remained stoic, breathing and thrumming my fingers against my leg. Their were painting on the grey gymnasium walls obviously done by elementary school children..

The room smelled of a potent mixture of bleach, mustiness, and meth. I looked around the room at the various people here attending the meeting. Some had old tattered clothes that looked as though they and the people wearing them hadn’t been washed in weeks. They each had they’re little ticks, some scratched their wrists, some picked at scabs, others rubbed the back of their necks as their eyes darted around the room.

Then there was the other side of the circle the young and middle aged men dressed in their business casual suits. They carried them self with the smug confidence of someone who sold cars, times shares ran a strip club or at least frequented them. One man stood out in particular he was wearing a white button up with light blue stripes, with his sleeves rolled up just below his elbows, and a light grey vest opened unbuttoned. He had to be in his mid to late twenties. He had blonde hair slicked back with the sides shaved. He was chewing gum with such vigor that he probably would of chipped his teeth without it. He cracked his neck from side to side, his eyes to the ceiling obviously thinking about or planning out the rest of his night after this whole sham of a meeting was over.

“Mr. Kopes. Would you like to introduce yourself and tell us why you’re here? It’s common for new members to do so.” The councilor asked with an accepting smile that was probably just a programmed response at this point from years in this field.

He had light brown hair but was clearly bald, though he combed his hair over to try and cover it. Which I always viewed as a sign of insecurity and desperate denial.

May as well get it over with I guess. “My name is Conner Kopes, some of you may know me by my pen name C.T Kopes. Well I guess I’m here cause i accidently feel asleep behind the wheel. Don’t worry I didn’t hurt anyone, just feel asleep at a stop sign.”

“Now Mr. Kopes, you wouldn’t be here at this N.A meeting if you simply fell asleep after a long day. You had quite a few narcotics in your system and in your vehicle at the time.”

“Oh hey! You’re C.T Kopes!? I’ve read a lot of your old work!” The fidgity man under the creaking wood floor blurted out. His eyes wide, and staring at me yet still darting around somehow.

“Well thank you… I’ll have to give you a copy or two of my newer works.” I was a little taken back that of everyone in here he’d been the one to have read my work. Then I instantly felt guilty for judging someone who obviously had a life before drugs. But then again I couldn’t fathom myself being in his position which made me an obvious hypocrite.

The councilor cleared his throat trying to refocus the group. “So about the pill bottles in the passenger seat?”

“It was Xanax. Something i am prescribed, and a bottle of Vicodin. I suffer from knee pain. The only reason my name wasn’t on the pill bottles was because sometimes I run out early or misplace my medicine, so I borrow some from a friend. I have anxiety alright, the Xanax helps me get through the book signings, meet and greets, and lectures. I’m an introvert, I need them to cope with people. They help me through the day. though i will admit they do make me a bit drowsy.”

“And what about the 8 ball of cocaine found in your laptop bag in the back seat?” The counselor asked. everything about the man was a mask of compassion, trying to cover up this hidden sense of superiority, and a smug condisending attitude .

The blonde haired kid with the vest and rolled up sleeves brightened slightly at that bit of information about the cocaine.

“Do newbies usually have to answer this many questions?” I ask growing annoyed. Being the center of attention wasn’t my thing and I didn’t have any Xanax too take so my breathing was beginning to speed up.

“Not trying to push just want you to connect with the rest of the group and share about what brings you here today. If you rather not go into it any further…”

“I use the coke to write alright! it gets my mind going, my words flowing. It’s a tool nothing more. I’m not going out to night clubs partying. I’m at home doing a few lines and grinding out chapters. I have deadlines you know.” My heart was racing, I wish I had a Xanax.

“I smoke weed too is that a crime? Am I on trail here? Because I thought I got out of that by agreeing to these meetings. I’m not a drug addict. I’m a professional! A best selling author!“

“No need for hostility We here just want to help you to overcome this. To see if we can find you a safer way to cope. Drugs are not solutions Mr. Kopes.” He said with the aggravatingly smug smile that tried so hard to say I’m here for you but came across as I feel such pity for your poor soul.

“I smoke weed too come up with new story ideas it’s how I build my characters and world’s, and fantastical creatures it helps me get introspective. The Xanax is to deal with people. Deal with my publicist. Deal with the fans, the world. The Vicodin is for pain, I get hand cramps, I have knee pain. Everything I use, I use as a tool. Some people have real problems I just took to many Xanax, and Vicodin, and feel asleep at a stop sign. Yes I pop pills, yes I do Coke, yes I smoke weed, yes I drink alcohol but for me it’s nothing more than the tools on a Carpenters tool belt. Would you tell the carpenter to work without his tools!?”

There were quite a bit of mixed faces among the other members. Some half-heartidly agreed with a nod or a slight raise of their head. Others looked annoyed, angry. Like this famous author thought he was better than them. Others looked uncertain on how to feel questioning their sobriety or lack there of.

“I’m sure Mr. Kopes we can find you better tools for your tool belt.” The councilor said nervously trying to calm the situation and the group.

It was then that the fiddgity man with his untamed hair cleared his throat and spoke. “I was an Psy-psychology major… I minored in English… I c-called myself a writer. wr-wrote a couple books. none lived up to my expectations though so I never sub-submitted them. Then I tried LSD to expand my mind, it helped me it did I came up with new ideas. I used coke as w-well to stay up and write those last minute p-papers. Then as the pressures of graduation came near, and I had to do my thesis papers I de-stressed with… Harder drugs… Telling myself I was only using it once in a while to cope with stress so it was alright. I ended up using it to cope too often and ended up dropping out of school. I had one s-semester left.“ He scratched the side of his neck with dirty nails as tears trickled from the corner of his eyes.

I couldn’t speak simply stared into the boys eyes, peerng into his very soul. The rest of the group was silent.

The boy wiped the tears from his eyes cleared his throat and began again. “I used to love your book series Mr. Kopes. T-the one about Hopteses the demon Slayer. It was a common trope for a fantasy novel, a loner fighting evil b-battling demons, saving people, even entire villages. I reread those books when I fi-first started to come to these meetings. If Hopteses could battle literal demons, could fight countless battles and find redemption through saving countless lives in an effort to make up for his wife, daughter, and son he lost to a demon, then maybe I could battle my demons and come out b-better. I could g-get clean and maybe I c-couldn’t get my families trust again, but I could get better and help others. I could become a counselor and help people.”

“That’s a great goal Trevor. You did just get your one month chip a few weeks ago. You’re making great progress. I’m glad to see that a piece of work by Mr. Kopes here could help you with your addiction.” The counselor interjected smiling and nodding looking between the two men.

Trevor reached into the pocket of his dirty jeans and pulled out his one month chip. He flipped it around in his hands for a short while then tossed it at the feet of the counselor.

“I relapsed after hearing about C.T Kopes on the news.” Trevor looked at me with pain and sorrow in his eyes. “I r-realized then that Hopteses wasn’t a hero. He was simply an addict. He chewed jaru root constantly in the story it was said to induce adrenaline and protected him from the fear and mind illusions demons would use to trick mortals. I t-thought he was just being ever vi-vigilant. Then I noticed how he pushed everyone away from him. Where most demon Hunter worked in teams and groups in his story, Hopteses worked alone. He never took on a pupil. He never let anyone close to him. Hopteses wasn’t trying to redeem himself for his failure. He was torturing him self. An addict to jaru root and addicted to this constant battle that he went at alone. He wasn’t a hero he wanted to die. He was chasing death. He denied himself any happiness, any pleasure he lived to gain more scares to feel more pain. He couldn’t forgive himself for his one failure and so he figured he would prolong his own suffering. He didn’t care that he was saving people he didn’t even stay in town long enough to learn anyone’s name. It was a book series of a pained man slowly killing himself because he was powerless to undo his past failures… All you can do is suffer through the memories until you die.” Trevor wept openly freely.

I was taken back. I had written the book and somehow hadn’t realized truly how spot on the boy was. Hopteses was a part of myself as all my characters are, but some things we are blind to even of ourselves.

“I’m alone… I’m utterly alone. I fear happiness, I feel subconsciously that I don’t deserve it. I’ve made so many mistakes I’ve hurt people I loved. I use the drugs I do to cope. to help me. But deep down I’m hoping to not wake up one day.” I said eyes glistening but I refused to cry. Refused to let a single tear fall down my face.

“That’s quite the breakthrough Mr. Kopes.” The counselor said.

“Come on man you’re a world famous author. They’re making a fucking movie off of one of your book series! you make millions. You could be rolling in pussy and blow. Like you said your only here to get out of a stupid trail, for what possession. What do you have to be sad about? Spend a weekend with me and you’ll find good reason to live and be happy old man!” The cocky blonde haired kid with the slicked back hair and vest said.

“Bradley we are trying to overcome or addictions not promote the use of drugs. If you wish to be a hindrance to this groups progress then you can leave now either way your are getting no credit for this week’s session.” The counselor said sternly if looks could kill Bradley would be dead five times over.

Bradley cursed and stormed out of the gymnasium, pulling out his cell phone before he was even out of the door.

“I’m sorry about that little outburst. But despite the fact I feel that we have made some good breakthroughs and unfortunately some set backs.” The counselor scanned the whole group but lingered on Trevor and myself. “Since Mr. Kopes here is new he is going to need a sponsor. And I think you and Trevor would be a good fit to help each other.”

Trevor looked uncertain, his eyes darting to the ground, and back up to myself. I felt a lump in my chest. Reality is stranger than fiction at times and he reminded me so much of myself. Where I could of ended up at one slip up. At one failure. It wasn’t fair, this life wasn’t fair. But damn the world! if I could do one good thing in my life, and help one person. it would never balance out my wrongs but it would be something.

“I think it’s a great idea.” I said stading up walking towards trevor. “I would love to have Trevor be my sponsor. I would even like to check out some of your work. My publisher is always looking for new talent.” I said putting out my hand.

Trevor stood up pushed my hand away and embraced me so tightly I thought he’d forced all the air from my lungs. “Thank you” he whispered.

5 notes · View notes

kidsviral-blog · 6 years

Text

What Love Taught Me About Blackness

New Post has been published on https://kidsviral.info/what-love-taught-me-about-blackness/

What Love Taught Me About Blackness

A year in Paris and a complicated relationship — with a man and with my hair.

View this image ›

Jenny Chang/BuzzFeed

It was spring of 2010, the end of my freshman year of college abroad in Paris, and I let a man convince me to leave my hair behind. It wasn’t the fact that Omar claimed he was not French but actually Senegalese, even though he had a French passport, French driver’s license, and French minor crime record. It wasn’t because he had lived in banlieues, complicated neighborhoods on the outskirts of Paris, all his life and had a sort of streetwise charm to him.

Or that I often found myself mesmerized when he pursed his lips around a joint, with an amused look in his eyes when I always said no. Stop. It was not that he towered six inches above my 5-foot-5-inch frame as he spoke a little too enthusiastically about Allah, God’s mercies, the importance of Ramadan, and the beauty of Islam, with tiny bits of spit flying from his mouth to the tip of my nose. It definitely wasn’t when he giggled like a small girl, shoulders shaking, and nestled my mane of hair into his chest when I pointed out that he barely visited the mosque and drank too much Hennessey to be a good Muslim.

Maybe it started with the brief bout of college-age rebellion I felt that night when my mother called and shot horrified questions at me, after I told her I had been on a few dates with a 24-year-old man. I imagined her pacing up and down her office in the dusty, small town of Arusha, Tanzania, phone in hand, eyes hard behind her rimless glasses and immaculately braided hair, treading the line between the mother she was at home and the lawyer she was in the courtroom.

She just wanted to care, the right way, even though she was on another continent, trying to lasso a leash onto a lost child, heaving her voice all the way from Tanzania to my small studio in the heart of Paris. “Did you have sex with him?” After all, I needed to remember that I was Christian. We could not be together. If we were, there would be a price to pay. I kept silent. “You know he’s too old for you, and you never know, people might have AIDS. You just don’t know.” After all, we weren’t the same type of “black” or “African” that went together, and she wasn’t the type of mother who believed in romantic bullshit. He was muscular, dark, scraping lower middle class with a low-paying administrative job, and francophone; I was short, baby-faced, and fresh from a Long Island Christian boarding school, with an upper-middle-class family, a Zimbabwean passport, and British tendencies. “Are you there doing work? You know we sent you there to do well.”

I didn’t know what I was doing. But I pretended I did. That year, I refused to be naked for anyone. I wanted to be a serious writer, the kind who went to war zones, Marie Colvin-style, with an African twist. Not the kind who wrote about not knowing what to do with boys, or what to do with their own hair. I wanted to be my mother with a pen – the woman who held her faith close enough to her heart for it to mean something, but the same woman with an incisive brain and logic that carried her from the rural farm life in Buhera District, Zimbabwe, to a trial room at the U.N. I wanted to end the phone call, but she did first, with a prayer that left me with guilt that sat at the bottom of my conscience like dregs of bad wine.

But it was never about sex. It was about the divided soul I didn’t know I had, the one that struggled to let Omar touch my hair. For years, I had pretended that it was “just hair” and shrugged when boys asked why I didn’t get my “hair did” well enough. At boarding school, I hid it under dozens of weaves that made my skin itch, heavy extensions that would latch onto my fragile front strands, and hair relaxers that burned and left scabs on my sensitive scalp. In my hair’s natural state, I was almost as ashamed of it as I was of my chubby feet, which swelled out of my shoes during hot weather because of my mild lymphedema. When Omar would wait a little too long after walking me to a hair salon, I would squirm in my seat, hoping he would leave before the stylist started complaining about my crazy hair. He never did.

But as my hair shed when he gingerly unknotted it with his long fingers and combed it out in my apartment, my guard went down as well. My awkward problems, the ones I didn’t want to say out loud — being the only black student in my classes, feeling like the only one lost for words and conjugations on the streets of Paris — disappeared for hours at a time as he tried to sing along to pop songs in English blaring from my laptop, occasionally lifting the comb from my hair to his lips.

Beyond the hair, our problems with blackness were still embarrassing — like the times taxis wouldn’t stop for him but would stop for me if I stood a few feet away from him and pretended not to know him. The complications of blackness in Paris came in layers and genders and classes and accents. We laughed about it, but it stung. We laughed almost as hard as we did at my bad French between yassa and fish at his favorite Senegalese restaurant. Almost as hard as the time purple bissap juice oozed out of my nostrils in front of everyone.

On many weekends, we tried to do some of the iconic “Parisian” things I’d read about in high school textbooks. We planned to go to Père Lachaise cemetery, where people like Oscar Wilde were buried, and where couples supposedly left letters at the foot the tomb of Abelard and Heloise — two doomed lovers from the Middle Ages. Omar met me at the Gambetta Metro station near my apartment and declared last minute that we needed to go to a happier place. We took the train to the Latin Quarter instead and ate too much bread in a small bistro. We planned to go up the Eiffel Tower hand-in-hand but never made it there. We attempted to visit the Louvre and the Musée d’Orsay but it rained before we even got to the train, and we ended up in my apartment eating soggy falafel. There was never a candle-lit dinner with very old wine at a very expensive restaurant. We were never that kind of pair.

As my French got better, he listened as I recalled the day I left Zimbabwe when I was 10, not knowing that the home as I knew it was gone forever. I listened to his stories about the women he had dated, the police chase he had escaped in Spain, and the time when he was 17 and got caught with a bag of cocaine at the airport. He said all this slowly, unraveling, sometimes lowering his eyes in shame, as if I would be there forever. He detangled my hair and swept the floor and unclogged the shower drain too many times, with too much patience, as if I would not be leaving, as if our souls were not divided, as if this was that story about that deep black love I’d always heard about.

And I thought leaving would be much easier than staying. At the end of spring, I had promised Omar there would be no grand speeches of deep friendship the night before my departure, no talk about what could have been or never was. No long, lingering hugs after loading my luggage into the taxi and no crying in public when I got my boarding passes. He was not to see me off at the airport. The day before, I walked two of my favorite footbridges across the River Seine alone, as if I had shown them to myself. I gazed forward as I checked in my bags at Charles de Gaulle, spoke fast and casually as if I were ordering a meal from a fast-food joint. When the plane left the runway and took off, I went to sleep as if my heart didn’t hurt.

View this image ›

Fall moved slower in New York than it did in Paris, as I sat in parks, phone card in hand, watching yellow leaves lick the pavement, and wondering how much longer the calls would last. The calls got rationed: once a week, then once a month. Soon I ignored the foreign number. When I did summon the courage to answer, often after another bad fling with a college boy, too often after said boy had asked why I didn’t get my rowdy “hair did” for the date, Omar would shoot questions at me in frustrated, fast French. “You don’t want to talk anymore?” Silence. “Could you please make sure to find someone good?” Silence. “Someone who really knows you and wouldn’t want sex from you?” Silence. “Someone who knows the difference?”

The calls broke me. He was there, I was here. Even if I were there, same language, same god, no hair, we would always be in a state of away-ness, where I overthought everything and knew how to express nothing. I was the writer who didn’t know how to talk about feelings. Even at 19, I knew my feigned aloofness was crippling. I couldn’t help it. We would fail. As usual, I stopped answering — somehow thinking my silence would postpone the hurt.

I knew it was the end when I started thinking about the beginning. Since Paris, I had been more at peace with my hair, letting it be and grow out the way Omar had encouraged me to. I stopped straightening and frying it until it lay limply to the side. I cut all the lifeless ends off. I shot back confidently when, on a date, a boy asked me to get a hair relaxer. And when I washed my hair — which I had grown to love for the first time since elementary school — I stupidly played the first scene of that journey over and over again, as if it were the only song I had left.

It was the time I first met Omar in the Metro station during my first few weeks in France. My hair was a mess, as usual, even with tiny braids at the roots, there to fight the power of late-summer sweat and heat until I got it together. My bra strap hung to the side under my sleeve and my sneakers were slightly torn at the right toe, but I didn’t care. I had only a two-euro coin in my pocket, a stupid ploy to stop me from spending money on pastries between school and my apartment, but just enough for a train ride home. Omar, seeing the foreign mess that I was, offered, in a broken mixture of French and English, to take me out for dinner. He said he liked my hair.

Read more: http://www.buzzfeed.com/florencemadenga/what-love-taught-me-about-blackness

#blackness #college #paris #race #young love

0 notes