My first eight years of life were good. I thought the world was a good place. Mommy cared for me. Daddy, called "that dirty-rotten-son-of-a-bitch" by Mom, was not a part of my immediate life -- heck, I've only met him twice. But when I was 9 years old, I suffered through my first really traumatic experience.
Mom was splurging some credit to take me to a real park. I was super-excited by the idea of soft grass under my feet. Sensations in cyber-reality are never quite as complete as those of real life, and I guess the primal instinct inside me cried out for the feel of real grass. So, I was tightly gripping my mom's hand and babbling excitedly, as any 9-year-old would. We stepped out of our cube and into the gray, drab hallway that looks like millions of other hallways in the thousands of other tastelessly functional housing blocks.
We saw a group of men and women in black suits standing in the corrider three doors down from us. They were carrying the bodies of a fat, greasy-looking middle-aged man, and a grey-haired, sagging woman out of a cube. The air carried a horribly sickly-sweet stench. I gripped mommy's hand so tightly my knuckles turned white and stood absolutely still, shocked into silence. There was a smoking hole of charred flesh and blood where the man's face should have been, and a hideous gash across the woman's stomach. The gashes were black and charred (probably cauterized by a heat-knife). The bodies were efficiently carried away, blood was sponged from the floor, and the people in black suits left without saying a word. The hallway looked as grey, dreary, and empty as it ever had.
I can see myself, standing in the hallway, holding my mother's hand, a nine-year-old seeing a sight that she never knew could actually happen outside of cyber-stories. My face is pale, my eyes are wide in fear and shock. The image of the two pathetic bodies is seared into my mind.
Mom grabbed my hand, and hustled me out of the hallway. Whenever I tried to speak, she hushed me.
We got to the park, and mom payed the tons of credit it costs to enter. We sat down on the grass. And I just sat there, shocked. She told me to play.
I continued to just sit there, shocked.
I guess she got mad at me for being so self-centered in my feelings, because she told me again, "I paid good money for this and you've been begging me for this all week and you won't even play? How ungrateful can you get?"
I didn't even notice her. All I could see were the mangled bodies, the people in black, their grim efficiency.
Finally she shook me by the shoulders and said, "Get over yourself! Don't worry about it. It's not that big a deal. Why can't you be grateful for once in your dammed life and have some fun with me? Huh? Can't even find the time to love your mother, you brat!"
I started to cry, but I stopped when I saw mom getting ready to yell at me again. Wiping the snot from my nose and the tears from my eyes, I ran on the grass and pretended to have fun just so mom wouldn't yell at me again and call me ungrateful. I wanted more than anything for her to love me, to cuddle me, to like me. So, I shoved the demons in my mind into my subconscious and stopped myself from thinking forbidden thoughts. The lesson of that afternoon was that to think about the dead people was to risk losing the love of my mother, the one concrete relationship in my life.
I couldn't sleep that night. Whenever I closed my eyes, I found myself standing in a dream-hallway, and in slow motion I looked to my right and saw a dead man staggering towards me, and ran away from him and saw the dead woman blocking my way, and feel their reproach and anger that I was alive and they were dead.
I tiptoed out of bed in the middle of the night, and stumbled around my cube until I found my paper and crayons. I guess I intended to draw, something I always found soothing as a little kid. But instead of drawing, I began writing what had happened. I wrote about my fears, and I wrote to appease the demons of my dreams.
I saw dead man and a dead woman with holes in their bodies. Men and women wearing funny black suits carried them away. Mommy says don't worry about it but I'm scared that the man and woman hate me and mommy hates me.
That was my first journal entry. I was scared that mommy would not love me if she knew how scared I was of the dead man and dead woman, but I needed to tell someone my fears, so I turned to a private journal into which I could pour my soul.
I kept adding to my private journal, my paper journal. It is unheard of for people to keep anything that is paper except for art made by kids or professional artists, so I felt a thrill pass through my body when I realized that what I was doing was somehow special and implicity forbidden. In an era where everything is based on the flow of data, there was something incredibly comforting about holding REAL data in my hands that only I could know about. It was downright subversive, exotic, to write words by hand for myself.
So, my journal started as an outlet for my repressions, a kind of rebellion against the orders of my mother and society: "Don't worry about it."