Notebook To Burn

Velvet

The first thing we all learn when we start our education, if we are lucky enough to go through it, is that to be wrong is to be ridiculed. - Velvet Summers, first day at Oakhelm Primary                                                                                                          School

The first thing I noticed was the gates. They were brightly coloured, verging on neon, and even then I found them patronisingly cheerful. On that particular day, the sky was a foreboding grey, setting an almost amusing contrast to the assault on my eyes that I pushed open with just a bit too much force, so that it slammed loudly against the metal bike shed behind it.

The playground went silent momentarily, before the sound of parents gossiping and children running and screaming resumed its chaotic course.

Wrong.

There is a right way to open that gate, and that was not it. The odd hundred eyes penetrating me for those brief seconds used that shame, their gazes echoing wrong, wrong, wrong, to teach me an important lesson outside the classroom; get it right, or go home.

 These analytical, emotionless observations are easy to make (from the outside perspective I now have years later) but at the time, I just wanted to close the gate and walk ever so calmly away from the bright neon and false smiles and into the arms of forgiving familiarity.

As it stands, my mother's gentle pressure against my back forced me forward into the world, with an experience of shame already under my belt. School is supposed to prepare us for the adult world, that sentiment is repeated the closer we get to it, and it certainly holds true.

I spent the rest of that day, and my time there, keeping my mouth shut and getting things right. Teachers only require a certain amount of interaction, answering a question here and there. The internet was the only thing I admitted my mistakes to, searching everything we learnt until I couldn't get it wrong. That was how I lived my life, under the radar and perfectly quiet. All the same, the looks I received on my first day, the careless naivetê with which I began my time, followed me in every mistake I made. 

Try as you might - and I truly did - you cannot account for social mistakes. Scour the internet all you want, there is no way to cheat your way through a conversation. Easier by far to acclimatise yourself to loneliness, let it befriend you and protect you from all the things you cannot do.

One day in a school yard, 173 eyes glared at me and a neon gate shattered a silence I kept forever after.

That was how Velvet Summers learnt to be right.