In remembrance...

It's amazing to me that I can so easily go back to that time that appears in front of my eyes and removes me from the now... I remember thinking how I could just fall in love with him, like just flowing away. Even with all his trials and burdens which I could see instantly, not because I'm a keen judge but because well, there they were; I simply wanted to be loved. To be beholden to someone in a pair, one of the someones in a pair...and soon I am back to here. Here is my wisdom of age: no one knows what is in store for ourselves, where life rides through. You just end up there. Recently I was out amongst with friends and we were talking with a man who was the drummer in the night's entertainment. My friends, both female, petite, (as a woman is smaller than most men: smaller hands, smaller waist, narrow shoulders) were relaxedly sitting on the high pleather bar stools; I was leaning against mine, unable to actually sit on the tall small slippery seat. This man turned to me and as he was speaking to me, clamped his hand on my left shoulder. I stood there, my eyes locked on his face but no expression in mine; I had known immediately the view of the fatgirl that this man had that made him be at his ease to touch me, when he had not touched either of my friends. I have lived in this body my whole life. Oh yes everyone does, but a body of layers is much different. I was aware of the distortion (as was everybody else) as early as six years. A boy in my kindergarten class used to follow me home, knock me down and then sit on me, grinning while I squirmed under him, not crying but full of fear. My parents asked the school crossing guard to walk me home after she had gotten all the children across the busy Park/Court Sts. intersection towards their homes. However they never told me; so all I knew was that this stern-looking woman in a very official uniform would tell me to "wait here until I'm done". I thought I would be arrested, so I would run away from her as soon as she turned her back, cutting through the church with a quick terrified prayer to God to please tell me what I'd done. At about nine years of age I remember the realization that I was not just a disappointment to my mother but also an embarrassment, and that while she could maybe live with the former, she hated me for the latter. Mother grew up in the days of WOP, dago, greaseball, and she never wanted us to be the big wild guinnie family with a ton of kids, literally. Some of my sisters were chubby but no one was like me. At family gatherings my father's sisters would sidle up to my mother, whispering feverishly in her ear that they were so sure she was frantic at how fat I was and what was she planning to do about it? And with each of these instances she resented me a little more.