When I Knew Hate

My grandfather would pick me up bright and early to take me to school. This way, I wouldn't have to walk especially during the winter, and if my eldest brother had not abandoned me to the bullies, then there would have been no need for this ride. I would've walked with him, but instead I ride in this car. And on this particular morning, I caught my first glimpse of Hate.

I wasn't sure if it was a bar. It was off the corner of a major roadway, and two cops hauled a black man outside. They threw him against the outside of the building and drew menacingly close, and before my grandfather knew what was happening, I had the car door unlocked and wide open. But he grabbed me by the arm and pulled me back inside, telling me that it was none of my business, and that was that. And the traffic light turned green.

It was during this time, where I met A. She was a beautiful little girl with blonde hair and blue eyes, a spitting image of Cinderella, and she did not have a mean bone in her whole body. But that was a long time ago. Her mother drew me aside during A's birthday party to tell me, an eight-year-old, that a Jew could not be a friend of her daughter's, and that was that. Our friendship was over, and again, I met Hate at the corner of my youth. And it came later wearing hockey masks and with hockey sticks that swung viciously at my front door and windows on a little street in Massapequa Park.

She struck me again with the ruler. She was supposed to be my teacher, teaching me from right to wrong, and she hated that I wrote with my left hand. She tore the pen from my small fingers and plunged the object against the right, cutting skin and forced me to write because the right would always hate the left. She was the first of a few that I would later encounter, those that hate the south paw, the ones thought twisted but the ones, who would change the world.

Hate rode beside me during the trials of my youth. It was the bitter arguments, the wars waged between me and my parents. It was the hostility of teachers, who did not like me, and I did not like them. It was the tension between me and my peers, the unrelenting bullies straight to the very end, graduation day, and never would I forget them. Or those like Mrs. H, who threw me out of her Art class, telling me in front of my peers that I would never become anything, that I would always be nothing. If only she could see me now.

And there are days, where I am my own worst enemy. I hate everything about me. I hate how my clothes fit, how my hair and face look, and how I behave. I hate the job I'm in, and I think that maybe, Mrs. H was right. But it's that little voice that we listen to, that I listen to that could tear down my whole world because I hate, and I can't. I can't love myself because I'm far from there, but there is no reason to hate. This is who I am, and living the single life, there is only one person to count on, to trust. And that is me.

I have known Hate for a very long time. I found it in the men that I sought comfort with, trying desperately to feel love, but all that they had given me was lust and control. They chewed me up and spat me out, stepping on the remains, and I lost many years to being broken. I am tired of being broken. I am tired of knowing hate, and now I want to know love. But is such a thing possible with so many bad memories?