Hallway

Thinking about that last post about the people reading their teenage diaries for a crowd got me all retrospective today. I started thinking about the school that I went to until 6th grade. It is sort of a crazy school in some ways (very rigid with certain rules and such) There was this hallway when you first walked in that had this mural on it of kids (six of them alternating boy/girl/boy....) holding hands.....only it was just the shadowed figures, each one a different color (red, blue, green, etc). I have actually been thinking about this hallway for about a week now, but today I got inspired to look through old yearbooks to see if there was any pictures of this hallway and I did find one that has all of the figures mostly visible in it.

Next to that hallway was the cafeteria and after lunch you would stand in line with your class (with no talking--they were very big on no talking!) for a few minutes before walking back to your room. I remember staring at that mural everyday and making up these wierd stories in my mind about it. I used to pretend that if I would just break out of line and run over there, I could go up to the purple girl (she had an outline of hair that was the most similar to mine) and if I ran into her picture on the wall I would be transported somewhere else. Strangely it was usually to a different school that I pretended I would go......not away from school, just a different one. There was also the depressed days that I imagined that if I did the same thing I would find where they hid kids who were in trouble.....sort of a dungeon/graveyard thing that is way too dark to go into, and I am saddened that at the age of 5 or 6 it was even created in my mind.

As an adult looking back, I know that this was during the sexual abuse years and of course it makes sense that I would want to get away from where I was in general.....and that school situation didn't help much-it seemed that they structured things in such a way that you didn't socialize with anyone (students or teachers-----no relationships at all) and that just helped me to continue to feel helpless in my silence about the abuse. Of course, I can't say that if I had been in a different school situation that I would have formed any type of relationship with someone that I would have told about the abuse. I would be lying to myself to try to blame it on the school entirely my poor social and relating skills.

I don't know why this hallway has been so present in my mind lately......I have even been dreaming about it and imagining drawings that I would like to do that involve it. Looking through those old yearbooks brought back so many memories from that school, and memories of the stories I created in my mind while I was there to escape from reality. Crazy.

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