Why I Cry, A. M. Piccirillo [online e reader TXT] 📗

I absolutely despise chemistry with every bone in my body. I despise it with every ligament, tendon, and vein…everything I have. I have never liked science, much less chemistry. I am extremely clumsy and have been for as long as I can remember as proven by the dozen various beakers and glass instruments I’ve accidentally – or not so accidentally – broken over the years. I can’t envisage anybody capable of so much hatred for an academic subject in my right mind, though I’m sure there are some who share my malice towards it. Each day in high school, I would have chemistry at alternating periods each day – some days the first, some the middle, some the last – but it didn’t matter when I had it, I would always get the same feeling of complete anguish when I entered the room, always reeking of formaldehyde and miscellaneous other substances.
The room was dismal – one large window that was always shaded by preference of the teacher (or “lab instructor”, as they preferred to be called) with grey-white walls which were clearly pure white at one point but had grown inconceivably filthy over the years. The walls were constructed of bricks larger than two of my head, side by side, and this gave the bleak area an even stronger sensation of “insane asylum”. I was always curious of how the teacher remained relatively sound in such a miserable environment, but my sympathy vanished as soon as the bell rang. The bell – the worst of all school day noises. It trumps the bothersome noise of teenage girls giggling at you as they pass, the squeal of chalk against a black board when the teacher’s wrist moves the wrong way, the rambling of a teacher as they dictate their never-ending lectures to you day after day after day…the bell is by far the most disheartening.
The bell meant you were trapped. You were locked in the cell with twenty other juveniles all existing to make your life a living hell until that blissful moment when you are released, only to serve again the next day. You may all be wearing the same orange suit, but to them, your orange suit isn’t quite as bright. To them, your orange suit is out-of-date. “Do you see that?” they say, “do you see the way that suit fits her? People like her should never be wearing that,” they whisper. As if I have a choice.
Then you pick a bench. You don’t get to choose who you sit next to in your cell or who your cell mates are. You are forced to sit together and make conversation or not make conversation as they watch everything you do, watch you when you go to the bathroom or when you’re looking around, observing anything to avoid making eye contact. You know none of them want to be your friends, none of them will give you the time of day. You know you don’t belong here, why are you here? And then you take off your suit because it’s almost time to be set free, to go home and pretend none of it happened, none of it bothered you, when you realize you can’t rid yourself of that awful prison smell. That lingering smell created from a mix of ungodly odors, none of which your own body actually produced.
When you leave prison, even after only an hour, you never look the same. You don’t smell the same, your hair is different; your face is sunken and dark. You can go home and try to wash the smell off of you, but it never goes away. You can pull and tug at the ends of your hair for the rest of your life, but it will never grow back the same way. You can try to put on as much make up as possible to cover up your ugly, sunken face, but it doesn’t matter. You look at yourself in the mirror and think “who is this person?” and “why did his happen to me? I didn’t do anything wrong?” But then you accept it, you give up because there’s nothing you can do to erase it.
The problem with it all is that you have to go back the next day. It isn’t a one-time thing, like most minor criminals, you have a full year sentence to hell and back, and then another three years in another cell with brand new jail mates. You’re sentenced to life; it never ends because you never forget.

Publication Date: 04-15-2011

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