My whole life I’ve been different. Now, I’m not saying that to sound “special” or anything. I was always kind of weird. Weird and oblivious. I had just about no cares of what people thought of me. I thought I was awesome, so why wouldn’t they? That’s how I made it seem on the outside anyway. When I was younger (and even now sometimes) I had real trouble reading. The letters, words, numbers….they all just blurred together. In first grade, the teacher couldn’t deal with me each time something was on the board that I couldn’t read. Mizuki-sensei eventually had me sit on the ground close to the board. He gave me this cheaply made, blue, plastic, floor desk, and I thought it was so cool. I was like ooh, I get this fancy desk. Everyone else could have been making fun of the “dumb boy who couldn’t read on the floor,” but I didn’t care. They, all of them, were, in some small way, noticed me. It felt good to be seen. Besides that, I was still over there thinking my desk was awesome.
A good way to explain my oddness is that I’m like that one person in one of those pictures on the internet that says something like, “There’s always that one person.” Well, in most cases that’s me. Now there have been some people who accepted me despite my eccentricity. These are the first people who really cared about me. Who never left me.
When I was in Kindergarten, I just could never seem to get the hang of The Month Song. You know that one? I’m going to go with probably. Well for the most of grade school I would just pretend I knew how to do the homework. Don’t get me wrong; with this method I had no astounding grades. I was barely just scraping by. Eventually, in the 5th grade I got a teacher who noticed…. and cared enough to help. Iruka-sensei (now sensei again!) sat with every day before class started determined to get me to memorize the twelve months. I was actually doing pretty well at first, with him going through them individually with me. That is until….I got to October. For some reason I would just leave it out altogether. Not because I didn’t know it existed, oh no, I knew it existed. It was the month of Halloween. I loved it! The other reason I knew of it was because Iruka-sensei had been singing that part of the song over and over and over again to try to get me to learn it. Even to this day, I can remember sitting in the classroom, both still sleepy cause of the early hour, singing the song repeatedly. Repeatedly is an understatement! It was around the 2nd week before I finally started to get it.
The same thing happened when learning cursive, learning to do jumping jacks, or even reading the clock. Actually, most of my schooling took a whole lot of drills for that matter. Every day after school he would always take time to help me. Even though he worked all day and already helped before class, he’d sit at a desk next to me, no matter how tired he was, and help me with whatever I couldn’t get. Just like with the months of the year, he never stopped trying to help me until I actually succeeded.
Another one of my quirks is how I need my things to be. I don’t mean clean or even dirt-free; I mean how I need it to be orderly and exactly how I like it. “Clears throat.” So, last year the school had some sort of drive to collect used toys. “Toys” was a wide variety. Lots of people decided to donate board games. Just to put it in perspective how many games were donated; I’d say there was at least 50-60. Now not to rip on donators because some people treated their games really well; boxed not ripped, all the pieces, no bent cards, etc. and they were trying to do good. Then there were the other donators. They basically gave us a mess of what was once a board game and is now a combination of three board games, a deck of playing cards, and in some cases old food. Let me tell you, it was trashed! Games were shoved in wrong, games were falling open, missing pieces were on the ground, and there was even actual just dirt.
Every student was assigned jobs for the drive. Needless to say I was picked to clean the board games. Lucky for me, I was not alone. One of my best and only friends at the time (still one of best, you know?) was paired with me; Sakura. For Sakura cleaning and organizing was one of her favorite activities. Basically she liked hard work, something we both had in common. It took hours to just lie out, sort, and find all the pieces of the games.
After a while though, when we needed to put the games away, we got into this huge argument. As I said, I like very much, things to be cleaned my way. We started screaming, and our teacher gave Sakura the option to quit and leave the entire rest of the mess to me (because I was one of the troubled students). Sakura didn’t quit. Instead, we painstakingly worked on a compromise. An hour and half later, we finished. She stayed and helped me clean even though it was difficult. I was difficult. She didn’t give up on the project we started together no matter how annoying I was. She never does.
Kick forward a couple years, and I’m driving. And let me tell you, I was a hot shot. Now, if only paper could convey a sarcastic voice. Let me rephrase. Driving was hard! I have depth perception problems. I can’t even see 3.D. right! I’m sure there’s a fancy name for it, but I think you get the point. Anyway, with my sight issues, plus driving being hard, I had to get a lot of help. That help came from my English teacher and official Transportation Instructor (something I insisted on calling him to his dismay) Kakashi-sensei! At least the first seven times in the car, I wasn’t allowed on the road; only in parking lots. Even so, for those first few times, I always managed to get him car sick. I enjoy these memories though. For an hour each time, he would listen to me give him play-by-play of the anime I was watching.
Even with all my practice though, on the days of all three different tests; Permit, License 1, License 2, I failed. I failed hard. On the actual driving test, with the real proctor in the car, I drove up the wrong side of the rode. But did Kakashi-sensei give up on me? Oh no! He had me drive him about everywhere. I do remember the time I drove up on the round-about side walk. Neither could stop laughing, something he still will deny to this day. On the day of the next test, he was prepared and gave me an empowering (and threatening) speech. Needless to say, I passed that day. But even with the fails….and the near deadly fails, he stayed at it with me.
This next story is actually kind of funny. It’s about my little brother Konohamaru. He’s not my brother by blood, but he’s my brother the same, you know? My frieds and I (Sasuke-teme and Sakura-chan) make it a mission of ours to three times a month, do something Konohamuru and his friends, Udon and Moegi want to do. We simply call them “times” and they each pick something for the rest of us to do. Every time, for months, Moegi would pick to learn a Japanese/duet/ballroom/pop kind of dance with Sakura.
After a lot of talks and debates we decided that the rest of us could do other activities while they danced. Udon is incredibly shy about dancing and Sasuke is to “cool” to dance. (He’s really just a big softy and wanted Udon to not feel pressured.) Konohamuru and I were partners. Since I was taller, I played the male role, so he had to play the female role. We tried, and I mean tried hard, to follow those dance moves. But oh, they were very difficult, meticulous, and fast. The thing about the two of us dancing was that we didn’t have to. Konohamuru could have chosen to have me play just about any other game with him, but he danced. He danced with me instead. He knew I wanted to learn those moves. So, even though it took us twice as long as the other two, with more than one dance related injury, he kept at it with me. He didn’t give up on the thing I really wanted to succeed at.
Sasuke-teme has stuck with me through a lot of bad ideas. By bad ideas, I mean not good. Here’s just a list off the top of my head: going head-first down a water slide at public pool…yelled at and given lecture on rules, jumping from one inflatable to another…yelled at and almost kicked out, putting a thermometer into the microwave…explosion and broken thermometer. The list goes on.
This one time, we were volunteering alone for the first time at our humane society. The people who worked there were nice and asked me if I could walk big dogs. Well, me being me, of course I agreed. This part is very note-worthy. Sasuke said we should start with small dogs and work our way up. But I begged him because I thought the big dogs didn’t get walked a lot. Everything was going good walking our hundred and fifty pound dog until the dog started jumping. I will say this now. I did not let go of the leash, but the dog did get away. How you might ask. The dog slipped out of her collar and took off running. Sasuke ran to get help, while I bolted after the dog. And, oh crap, that dog was fast! The dog ran toward these stupid people who were just standing there, doing nothing, with their dogs that were four times smaller than our dog. The worker that he got helped me catch the dog and no one got hurt.
Even though Sasuke was right about starting small, he never gave me grief about it. He may have teased me, joked, and was kinda a jerk, but he didn’t even say I told you so. Needless to say, he never stopped helping me with my “ideas” and helping me clean up some of the not-so-good ones.
So, yeah my oddities and annoyances have caused them all some trouble. I can say I’ve accidently injured all of them at least once, but they never stopped being there for me. No, they never stopped. They never stopped when I started to fade. They never stopped when I stopped smiling. They never stopped when I stopped eating. They never stopped when I couldn’t form sentences. They never stopped even after they found out what I had. I had….still have more than one mental disorder. They started to really kick in after puberty. They made me act sad and see things that weren’t there. But my family, my real family, stayed and helped me every step of the way.
They even stayed after they found out that the thoughts and things would never fully go away. They could have let me drown in the darkness I was stuck in, but they didn’t. They didn’t. They pulled and ripped and yanked and held on to me until I was out. They saved me. They never once gave up on me. So, now here I am writing, saying how I feel and think. There’s no way I can ever tell them enough, how wonderful they are, but I’ll try.
I will also tell them this: “No matter what problems you have or enemies you face, I’ll always be here. I will never give up on you. Just like you guys didn’t on me.” All this includes you teach.