the day the music died

I didn’t ask to be beautiful. At least I don’t think I did. My theory is pretty clichéd, I was a bodiless child-like spirit in heaven and God in His grandfather image asked me if I wanted to be born. I said yes, and He told me that I had chosen two people for my parents. I looked at them from up there, remembered them from when they were in the place I was in, loved them beyond any depth possible. And it was with that feeling of overwhelming thankfulness, where my cup brimmeth over, I was born.
I used to think I would die after class 6. That was because for as long as I could remember I would have images, ideas as to what I would be in the next year, and the year after that, and the year after that. And those images always came true, when I would be playing in field, when I would look at a friend, when I would pause at an end of a sentence and feel like I had said that same thing a hundred times before in that same place. Those memories were like small markers by the wayside, like those bonus points in a Mario Nintendo game that you can pick up, if you pass through a certain point on a path. Other people call the feeling déjà vu. I would learn that from a Readers Digest article years later. Whenever I tried to see beyond class 6, I couldn’t. It was like some great void, and I could only equate it with death, and be distantly afraid, but not really.
Class 6 came, one of the best years on my life. I realized it then too, even though I would stare in the mirror every day and whisper to myself “You are ugly. You are ugly”. Till I would believe myself. It was something incredibly naughty and vain to think of myself as pretty. I would hate myself when the new boy sitting opposite me would tell his friend to tell my friend that he liked me. I would hate myself because I would like the feeling I would get when he said that, it was a warm glow that was alien and secret and exciting. A feeling I would find rarer and rarer to recapture as years went on, twinge with regret whenever I recapture those memories.
So when the boy and I finally grew up and realized what that glow was, and he asked me to dance at a party, I made up some silly story and told him I couldn’t because I was scared of myself. When countless boys did it, ones I didn’t even like, I would still turn them all down, because even when I didn’t like them I would still feel proud that out of all the girls in my entire class they were picking me, and that was a horrible thing to think.
I was messed up. I still don’t know it happened.
I don’t even know how I got over it. But I think it had to do with things finally building up to a point where a dam burst, when I finally screamed and shouted in anger and frustration, when I kicked and broke things, when I wore my brothers boxing gloves and punched the wall. When I stopped trying to please people I could never please, when I stopped trying to live by a God that was as bigoted and misguided as the people who told me about Him.
When I hated the people I had loved so much, when I stopped praying in thankfulness to God, because I didn’t like how it made me feel.
When I said the word “fuck” for the first time, and then got hit on the head with a football. When the Pepsi bottle I was holding came between my forehead and the ball. When I dripped blood to the sick bay, took the day off, and got my first two stitches under full blown howls and screams of 12 year old lungs.
That was the year I think I died.