I guess it isn't that surprising. Paying attention in class is difficult, especially when your parents and doctors keep reminding me that I have Attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder. A self-fulfilling prophecy. If you tell a child how they act often enough, they will. I'll take a different-coloured, different-chalk-tasting pill every year until we find the one that works best. This cycle will continue for eight years, when I decide to abandon them altogether out of neglect.
So, of course I can't focus, I can't remember. Everyone has photographic memory but me. That hardly seems fair to me, a third-grader. But it is only how my benevolent Christian God has produced me. Perhaps with a purpose. In my weekly class at the church, preparing me to receive communion and later confirmation, at least I can not fail; I will be accepted into the Church of St. Gregory the Great even if I mistake John for Job and Moses for Mark.
But they're all dead, anyway. It's not like those men will answer my prayers; only God will.
Because he must. Because, when you give a child without confidence Ritalin for enough days, I will eventually break apart as it washes out of my system. Like clockwork, at 4 o'clock after school, I will be all broken thoughts and tears collapsed under my sheets for long hours. Mom can't cope with that, not every day, who else will I turn to? God has become something ever-present in my mind, like a small stone of luck kept in my pocket that I rub and with upon.
And my pockets are always weighed down by stones, bits of grass, bloody tissues and stale erasers broken off the ends of old pencils. In wishing during every moment when I should have been looking at vocabulary, it has become compulsive and irrational. Everything pathetic and discarded will cry out from neglect, calling if you do not take me, I will be orphaned, left to death. I can do little except to take those things, and hid them in books, in ornamental boxes, in the cracks of my bed, in my stomach. I will give them refuge in my own life, is it not that which God would have for me?
This develops into an empathy for all things inanimate, an empathy which I am comforted in. Mom and Dad are not, throwing out my things, making me empty my pockets when they are filled. There is not much that I have to be proud of, and everyone is telling me that I am not good at learning anyway. Why should I ever try? What could there possible be to gain?
My grades show that I have learned nothing, less then nothing; that I have mis-learned and now have all the wrong ideas and all the wrong dates. And what is worse, all of my classmates have realised my eccentricities and unpredictability, I have mis-learned the social sphere as well. Among those who now purposely distance me, where could I ever fit in?
I can't ever make mistakes.