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1

My mother tells me that when I was a baby, my parents had to sometimes check to make sure I was still alive. I would sleep roughly twenty hours a day, and to the many families that had crying children waiting to wake them up a three in the morning, I'm sure I appeared to be some sort of pint-sized miracle. Because of the long periods of sleep I got at that age, I don't recall much from those really early years of my childhood. Regardless though, my parents always regarded me as the "peaceful one", a fact which I'm sure they were highly grateful for. The only memory I can retrieve from my childhood is one that has been somewhat superimposed into my mind, and one which I still doubt the authenticity of. My parents claim that when I was one and a half, I was able to sit down with a puzzle of the United States, and name every single state capital as I picked up the tiles, before turning them over to verify if I had the right answer. I still find this story to be somewhat sketchy, but my parents will tell me that it's the first time they knew I would turn out to be a genius. Keep in mind that this was just their opinion, though.

My parents, Barbara and Christopher, had been residents of Philadelphia their entire lives, one for only four days longer than the other. My mother, hailing from the Northwest district of Roxborough, and my Father, a resident of the neighborhood made famous by Will Smith, met each other in the honours program at Temple University, one of the most prestigious schools in the nation. My mother was, and still is a rather starry-eyed woman, her face having a charming pudge to it, supported by her frameless oval glasses, and her short, wavy black hair. She was and still is a rather short woman, and has always had a healthy appearance to her. The same applies to my father, except for him being an entire foot taller than her, his short curly locks of orange and scruffy beard framing his square-shaped head rather quaintly.

My father was there to study Computer Programming, while my mother, well, she didn't really know what she wanted to do. She ended up changing her major to a number of things from theatre, to journalism, to secondary math education, to a Classic Culture major with a minor in Anthropology, until her scholarship eventually ran out. Because of this, my mother never managed to finish college, while my father graduated with his Bachelor's degree. However, they remained together, despite this setback. After my dad finished college, they ended up getting an apartment in the middle of the city together with two cats, Mackenzie and Bambridge, as my father put his degree to good use, and my mother took up being a waitress to make ends meet. A couple years later, the two would get married, and take out a mortgage on the building that would one day be my home.

The house had been built roughly 100 years ago, during the advent of the Industrial Revolution, and when Philadelphia was gradually expanding outside the borders now called Center City. Every day, dozens of busses would drive by the house, guzzling fuel like a big oil-dependent toddler, and there I lay, sleeping through it all. This side of the house is where I slept, along with my parents, an arrangement which would soon become alien to me. Meanwhile, the "Family Room" was on the opposite side of the house, overlooking the various gardens bordering the alleyway. I would end up spending a lot of time in this room during my early years, watching Disney films with my parents, or various childrens shows on PBS. Every night, my parents would make sure to read me a story, and sing a lullaby before I would drift back into my extended slumber. It was a pretty simple life, and I enjoyed it thoroughly.

Around when I was two, that peaceful reputation that I had surmounted, quickly vanished. By this point, I had taught myself to walk and talk, and Mackenzie had died, after she accidentally jumped off the kitchen counter and hit her head on the tile, an event I have no recollection of. But most importantly, on September 9th, 1994, my sister Rachel had come into the world, in the same hospital I had been in two years prior. From what I recall, there were no feelings of jealousy that many siblings feel when someone new is brought into the equation; Although admittedly, I was always quick to pass the blame off to my sister if I ever did something wrong. This could range anywhere from blaming her for flushing the pieces of a plastic tea set down the toilet, or taking every single thing in the Family Room, and throwing it across the room to try and cover up the floor (although really, that had been a team effort). However, I did do positive things for her, such as teaching her to write her own name. I'm told that this alone was impressive, not to mention that I had learned to write my own name and read by age four, but I doubt I would have been able to get to that point without the help of my parents. By this point though, my life had not truly begun, instead being self-contained in the universe that was going to the park, and stacking letter blocks to see how high they would tower. Instead, my life truly began when I first went to Day Care, and got a taste of the trajectory my social life would one day take.

The building I went to Day Care in was part of a two-building complex, the Martin building housing those from Pre-K to Fourth Grade, and the Bache building home to all those in middle school. Both buildings were grimy, brick-like structures, the latter shaped like a supermodel down on her luck, while the other resembled a short stocky house-husband who couldn't be bothered to shower if he woke up past noon. For some peculiar reason, the Martin building was only a single story, the building essentially a square segmented in the middle by a long hallway, with a tiny second floor packed into the side of this hallway, dedicated normally to violin rehearsals. On one side of the dividend was a huge sprawling blacktop, completely devoid of any jungle gym equipment. Instead, the kids were given hula hoops and various types of balls, and told to use their imaginations. On the other side, there existed a sprawling garden, perhaps one of the loveliest aspects of the school. However, it wouldn't be for another year until I would see most of what the building had to offer. Instead, I was to be constrained to the Pre-K room near the entrance of the building for eight hours every day, only allowed to leave for the purpose of playing outside.

The first day I went to Bache-Martin is understandably fuzzy in my head, having only been alive for short of five years. I was with my mother that day, holding her hand as we trekked three blocks underneath a series of swaying autumn trees, before arriving at the archaic structure, and passing through its white and puke colored halls. For some reason, I had not been enrolled before the school year had started, evident in the fact that we arrived in the middle of the day, and in the fact that the room was empty, images of kids frolicking outside passing by the Day Care's windows. As I looked impatiently about my new surroundings, my mother spoke to Mr. Mike, the maintainer of the Day Care. He had the stature of a family man to him, a reassuring smile always adorning his face, his frame similar to my father's, although they certainly differed when it came to his short black hair, bushy comb-like mustache, and rectangular spectacles sitting atop his nose. The meeting of him and my mother seemed to be to reassure my mother that he and the others had a grip on what they were doing, and explaining the procedures.

Although I remember the room we were in as being colossal, the disposition of having been half the height I am now probably made it seem a lot huger than it really was. Having not been in it in nearly fifteen years, the only clear images I have is of the dull grey carpet, fingerpainted concoctions hanging from clotheslines, three round tables for us to sit and eat lunch at surrounded by various shelves and cubby holes, the ancient Power Macintoshes shoved away in the corner on a thin wooden table, and the bathroom at the back of the room that smelled like rotting piss. Every morning, we would learn about something arbitrarily simple, like how to count, the alphabet, mixing colors, or understanding the different types of weather. After that, we would eat lunch, and go outside to play for a while, before breaking out a bunch of blue, army-style cots for "nap time", where everyone had an assigned cot. After waking up, we were pretty much free to do whatever we pleased (so long as it didn't involve mingling with the older kids in some way), until we were taken home by our parents, and the process repeated 180 times more.

Throughout Day-Care, I wasn't a terribly outgoing kid, having never been put in such a social situation before. However, it was here that I made my first best friend, Max Perry, a frail, beaming kid with lots of energy and blonde hair. We had as much of a bond as four and five year olds could possibly have, the both of us finding a strange fascination with feet, which usually manifested in us whispering across the room during nap time, kicking our bare feet in the air like a couple of hyperactive jackals. My other friend at the time, Matthew, was a skinny kid with a short brown bowl cut, and someone who always seemed to wear stuffy sweatshirts, no matter what the weather.

My bond with Matthew was somewhat different from the silly one I had with Max, as someone had decided the two of us were too advanced for the things being taught in Pre-School. Because of this, Matthew and I would take a trip down to Ms. Zorin's Kindergarten class down the hall every morning, where we would sit down on a brightly and diversely patterned rug in the front of the room, and told to read aloud a paragraph she had written in Jumbotron sized letters, before being read one of the various age-appropriate storybooks lying around the classroom. There was something about this privilege of being able to go to the Kindergarten every day that, convinced me that I was better than my other peers on some level. This realization was not immediate, but over time, my behavior slowly began to change to reflect this supposed feeling of superiority.

A good example of this was in how I seemed to refuse to make friends with anyone else besides Matt and Max. Instead of becoming chummy with the rest of the kids, I instead chose to partake in the old tradition of creating imaginary friends. My creative process wasn't terribly refined at this point, as I seemed to simply cop characters from the cartoon Life With Louie, often pretending that the characters Jeanie and Tommy were real people, and were being crushed if anyone decided to sit where they were during snack time. For those who never saw Life With Louie, likely since it was cancelled after only a couple years on the air, Jeanie was a frail girl with a tall face surrounded by short brown hair, always wearing an aqua green shirt and jeans like cartoon characters like to do, while Tommy was the shape of a beach ball, and was a smattering of the primary colors we had been so eagerly educated about, sans the coating of peach on his skin. Aside from this, I also had the tendency to pretend that my toy cars were real, making them fly around and pretending they were superheroes. Coincidentally, I had never heard of Transformers in my life.

Although I've always struggled with the idea of whether or not I'm truly an extravert or an introvert during my teenage years, I suppose this more than anything is a testament to my naturally introverted ways, as I somehow found these projections of my mind just as satisfying as my real friends. Not particularly a bad thing, since it meant I had a good repertoire with my imagination- I just regret my imagination couldn't expand beyond copyrighted characters.

As far as settings and events went though, my mind was far more eclectic; because I was still a young kid with few friends and a supposedly genius brain, I found a strong affinity with the act of doing school work. Everything seemed to excite me about it, to the point where I considered doing worksheets a hobby. It wasn't Day Care that invigorated this passion me though, but rather the Kindergarten down the hall. Every day I seemed to fantasize about when I would get to spend six hours in that room every day, being given a chance to feel more challenged than I already was. This longing extended so far that I would pretend that I was a teacher in school, drawing on the recently acquired blackboard in my home, writing on it with a great eagerness, as I either lectured an audience of no one, my imaginary friends, or my sister.

Occasionally, the fantasy that I was a school teacher would play out in school itself, mainly on the blacktop. The clearest memory I have of doing this was a day when Max had gotten into trouble for reasons unbeknownst to me--and not because I've forgotten with time, I just flat-out never asked. It was a day of perpetual overcast as I marched around that sprawling blacktop with a faux sense of authority, handing out mysteriously acquired cartons of juice to the windowsills, pretending someone by them would snatch them up. The only person who actually received one of these tiny boxes was Max, who looked really displeased to be in time out.

"Come on Max, it's time to line up! Get in a line behind me and ONE, TWO, THREE, MARCH!" Max didn't budge, insisting he couldn't, which led to me pestering him a few more times before he started to get very visibly angry at me. Defeated, but not down, I took my teacher roleplay somewhere else, although possibly not before trying to teach him how to add four and five together.

As I made my way from Max, my knees seemed to swing up into the air in a dramatic fashion, drill sergeant of the foggy air. I kept this up for about five minutes before happening upon Frankie, a kid with a square face, and dark hair gelled up in the front to look like a skateboard ramp. Not wanting to give up my current activity, likely since I couldn't figure out anything else to do, I repeated what I had said to Max, which was only met with a blank stare.

"...What the heck are you talking about?"

As this all went on, my knees had still been kicking their way into the air, marching in place for a brief moment, before starting to advance towards Frankie. Interestingly, he didn't seem to budge from the spot he was sitting at, as I continued to chant the first two numbers I had ever learned, one after the other in rapid succession. Unfortunately, I can't seem to remember what Frankie did as I moved towards him--Either he didn't move at all, he slowly backed up, or he backed up while swinging at me. Considering how much of an anomaly I made myself to the other kids, I wouldn't blame for having such a reaction. However, if it was that, then the point at which he was struck may have very well been intentional, as after a few moments of incessant marching, my knee had managed to connect with his chin, causing him to fall back onto the hard asphalt. In an instant, a roar of crying erupted into the air as he rolled about on the ground, my mouth covered in shock as I looked all about, the stares of all the other children crawling under my skin and filling me with dread. From that point, it wasn't long until my arm was being grabbed by Mr. Mike, bushy mustache blowing in the wind as he pulled me inside, seemingly confused as to how I could do such a thing. As my tiny legs struggled to keep up with him, at the very least, I could be relieved to know that we were on the same page.

I can't seem to pull a clear memory together as to whether Mr. Mike and my parents, who inevitably learned of what had happened, believed that what I had done was accident, or was done with malicious intent. Regardless of the reason, I was thoroughly scolded by both Mom and Dad for causing harm to somebody else, Although I was certainly sorry at the time, face filled with tears and stricken with grief, that attitude of my touted intellect making me better than everyone else was indeed still intact--which I suppose gave weight to the idea that it wasn't entirely an accident, like I was trying to assert my greatness or something absurd like that. Whatever the reason, all I knew is that it wouldn't be the last time that something like this would happen.