The Special Generation by Christina Osborn

I’m not sure what to think about the millions of people in my age bracket because I have never known them. They and I have been estranged since first grade, when I was told I would have to “dumb myself down” in order to interact with “normal” kids. Instead of teaching me social skills my father delivered me from having to learn any. Instead of saying, “I’m not sure how to do that,” he relegated friendship to the bottom of a list of non-essentials. And as the parent-dependant oldest child of a sad poet and a princess I believed him. If hindsight is 20/20 my family is fucked because blindness runs through us, down through my father who was adopted by a woman who introduced him to strangers as her adopted son. He was alienated from the moment of his birth from a group of Indiana rednecks that are probably best left unknown anyway but what does a kid know about that when all he wants is a hand to hold his smaller hand instead of trying to clutch at a balled up fist or ducking a horseshoe ringing through the 80% humidity of the June afternoon that my father decided the day he got his diploma would be the last day he spent in the corner of Hell they call Kalamazoo. His family may be a bunch of cult beasts living in a cage but my family is a bunch of bats living in a cave on a hill with a fantastic view of the valley but no view to the north and I worry that if they get too used to their perch when they have to leave it and go back to the ground they’re going to be disappointed, as disappointed as I was when I found out I was different because I was smarter, different because the other kids didn’t have parents that would teach them how to think things through, emotional robots running on cheap fuel. And I can’t say I wasn’t completely seduced by the idea of being more special than the other kids, of holding my secret flam e a little higher than everyone else’s, even if they didn’t acknowledge me because they were jealous, I could see it in their eyes, their stupid soft doe eyes that had never seen their mother snorting coke off the kitchen counter, never seen a pile of dirty purple dildos the morning after whatever the fuck went on in the basement the night before. Their ears didn’t know what it was like to hear your father say, you are too stupid to think your way out of a wet paper bag. I was so special I got to move to twenty eight different shitholes before I was eighteen, cockroaches in the cupboards and pedophiles in and out of the house. Special doesn’t even begin to cover it. Lucky. Blessed. To bear witness to all the glories of the underbelly of God you have to be so special it hurts. So I ducked my head, rounded my shoulders, and disappeared for twelve years inside of a wardrobe of billowing black t-shirts and cargo pants. I swallowed myself so completely no one could touch me. I was so special I was invisible. I didn’t learn how to walk with my back straight and my shoulders loose and my hips swinging until I was twenty one and the bones had already started to set their course for an eternity of humpbacked solitude and it wasn’t that I was okay with it I had just surrendered to it. There was something especially wrong with me and I couldn’t figure out where the infection was stemming from. Luckily for urchins like me the human body is a resilient machine so as soon as I took mushrooms three times in a month after I graduated, I started to see where the problem lay and it wasn’t in the unbearable weight of the gazes of the thirty three people I walked out of high school with it was in the chorus of demons I had installed in my subconscious and that handful of fungi brought me face to face with my destroyers who had been working with bone saws and poison gas for as long as I’d been special to undermine my specialness, to bring me to my knees, to force me to look not at the piece of glass but through it and back into my own eyes. The ranks had swelled over the years and by then I was helpless in the face of so many of my monsters who wore my face for a mask, and if I’d pulled the mask off it would’ve just been me again, ad infinitum back to the marrow of my misery. So I succumbed screaming to a suicidal cannibalistic orgy of self on self on self until sweating I crawled out of the sleeping bag and begged for the sun to come up and when it did I surrendered to it too because I was too weak to hold myself out of the lake of fire I had fallen into. And staring into the sun I dreamt on my feet that my friends loved me more than I could ever imagine, that the world was beautiful and that I could do whatever I wanted. I dreamt that it was only me sitting on the iron throne and that I could coax my sinister self back to sweetness with souvenirs brought back from a better life. That was the beginning of my resolve to not be so special, to not be so fucking special that I had all different body parts and chemical processes then everyone else. It was the dawn of my understanding the differences between myself and the rest of my generation which isn’t so great that it separates me from them, but is in fact so small that I can measure it with experiences only because everything else is the same. My breath ebbs and flows. My feet stumble and my hands twitch and I have hair in embarrassing places and I have opinions and I am younger than I feel and older than I look and everyone on this earth has been alive just like me, and everyone who comes after will know the pain of love and the beauty of sorrow and the supernova implosion of losing someone you love. I am still getting to know these people in my generation, and I’m trying not to do it as a scientist studies a strange specimen, but as a child learns how to interact with a peer group, because I skipped all that when I was a kid and I’m tired of skipping the important stuff with the excuse that my family’s been doing it that way for generations.