TheLegendsLeague

When I got removed from my elementary school in 93 for behavioural issues and being a threat to other students, there was a period of time when it didn’t feel like I was under any structure at all. My parents sent me off to my aunties house and I upped and left after one night, walking for 5 hours to my girls house in an M65 jacket with a bandana around my face in the dead of october and sleeping on the pavement in her backyard while she dropped food out of her window for me.

I was 12 years old.

They tried to send me to my other aunties house soon after and I remember playing 8bit nintendo in the basement when I got a call from my mother saying I was going to be sent to a center where doctors could observe me for 3 days. I agreed to it, and on the first day after being seen off by my parents, I was grabbed by the wrists, walked up a set of stairs and told to strip naked and shower in front of 2 grown men. “Just keep the curtain open, you’ll do fine”. I was given velcro shoes and someone elses clothes for the first night, underwear and all, and those 3 days turned into 2 weeks of not seeing the sun, not being allowed to touch another person, stand at the table while cutlery was out, or be on the jack without a staff member listening in on our call. This was general procedure from what it seemed, and in some ways it made sense to me. (This is where I would meet Aaron Mathis, an 8 year old who has forever changed my life, and for that I am grateful). I was released on Christmas Eve, 1993.

When the new year came, they weren’t sure where to put me. I knew kids in many of the elementary schools in the etobicoke area, which to them wasn’t a good thing. But I also had many enemies. They sent me to a school split between upper middle class kipling and eglington ’sons of doctors’ and the kids from east mall flats government housing and the 5 and 7 Capri buildings who would come in by school bus. The dynamic was a funny one that I see a greater divide in now that I’m older. The news has recently headlined the closing gap of this divide with the word “Outrage”. I wouldn’t be so quick to blame the wolf.

During my first bit at this new school I was still dating my girlfriend from about a year prior. She was around for me when my dad choked me out unconscious, and heard everything about him and his choice of leather belts, wooden sticks, and creative ways to put me through grueling means to disciplinary change. Arms out like a crucifix with books in my hands. That’s what these shoulders are made from, girl, trust me. Her father, god rest his soul, would also later beat her til she bled from her ears much like 14 division would do to me 12 years later, and we would sit through mass at the local church, 12 and 13 years old, trying to figure out what to do. She, much like many of my girlfriends, would stay with me through the worst of times. I in turn would choke her against a brick wall for asking why Childrens Aid and the police had been picking my family apart. Her father was never told. They feared what he might do to me.

There was a period during me being kicked out of school where there was a school dance that I obviously couldn’t attend. I remember being stuck in my room, the same room I spent 4 months in on house arrest in 04. I remember going crazy thinking my 13 year old girlfriend was cheating on me. When she got home she called me and said the dance was fun and that she had danced with one of my best friends at the time. I freaked out and broke the phone I was on against the wall in my room. I tore the cord out of the jack and whipped it like a nunchuck against everything I could see. I totally lost control. And I ended up inside the closet in my room in tears. Those closet doors saw the first of my writings. 10 years later they were removed.

My next relationship was far less emotionally attached since the girl seemed far less willing to let me explore the limits of her physical innocence. She was very much an under the shirt, over the bra type of girl, and at 12 years old, I can say I found that very frustrating but quite respectable and normal for our age. Outside of hiding me in her basement after beating a kid up at keele station and once again at kipling station and running from the transit cops, she was fortunate enough to have never witnessed my controlling, paranoid and jealous behaviour. I once raced her little brother down Centennial Hill and fell halfway down, rolling and barreling like a bowling pin. He loved it, and because of that I didn’t mind it so much either.

“You told me that you loved me, and you’d never go away, bullshit…”

By the time I hit high school, I still hadn’t really experienced relationships how they are said to be in nuclear families, The Simpsons and Leave It To Beaver. When you get beat with sticks and then told that sometimes a branch needs to be tied in order to straighten out the whole tree, you start to feel like a broken twig. The communication is off. You are told you are loved and this is why they are sending you away, and then sent to more places of abuse and mistreatment. You’re placed in a room where flashlights are shone on you by overnight staff and you wake up to try to peak through the blinds to catch a glimpse of snowfall as it hits the street, stories below. And you are alone. You are with 15 other kids who are all also very much alone. And you musnt touch hands, let alone hold them. And then you are 14 and don’t know shit about feeling young and blissful. You are 15 and don’t ever believe those who tell you they love you because they are bound to either send you on your way, or leave you. Trust is something that is not earned. It barely even exists. And it, like honesty and sacred ways of humanness, becomes a far cry more than a reality.

…part 2 to follow.

DAY TWENTYEIGHT RESULTS:
Day Twentyeight Weight: 167.2 lbs.
Emotionally: read the post.
Appearance: My waist seems far more slim than it was when this all started.
Level Of Temptation To Cheat: 2 out of 10.
Cheat Beers: 0

Brought to you by: be.