This is not a pretty story. In fact, this is not a story at all, but a documentary: a biography, not of life celebrated, but of life declining the invitation to wake up. A story of meekness. A story from the dusty archives of my childhood. I don’t go there much, you see. The dust of the place stretches out its serrated cobwebs of hands everytime I breathe. It will reach into your lungs as it has mine for all these years. Shall we commence?

Do you happen to remember the stories you knew as a child? The ones where everything was for certain; there were good people and there were bad people. If you looked ugly, you were bad. You were evil. If you did not speak, it was because you hated people. That was why you had no friends-it was all your fault for being born the way you were. Everything was predetermined and there was absolutely nothing you could do but play your role in the prophecy.

This is how the world works for children. You don’t remember the stories you fabricated out of less than oxygen and more than spirit? How can you not? Your unfairness to the weak was justified by your heroes. No one ever helps the bad guy. To associate with the villain is to be a villain.

As a child I was hopelessly sickly. There was a time in my first graded year when I had to be home schooled if I wanted an education: there were far too many germs for my delicate immune system to recover in between. Sickness is a ghastly thing; an abuse you grow all too accustomed to. I was quiet when I was not coughing out my lungs. I did not speak much. I did not think like anyone else.

This difference in thought was my principal act of villainy. Many others would soon follow; many others that would lead me to almost being burned at the stake by my innocent children of classmates.

They thought my piercing, unwavering stare meant I was reaching for their souls. They believed my twitching, trembling fingers were weaving forbidden symbols into the air. Yes, they thought I was a witch. Children will be children. They are just using their imaginations. I know the words. Incantations of their own; they sedate our minds against what the user of the spell deems unsightly. The true nature of their meek and mild babies, may it never be seen. May the parents never, never be reminded of how they once were when they were supposed to be angelic! Never, ever shall they know the truth of their seething, sinful core. Forever the truth will be shrouded in ivy, lovely and vibrant in full bloom. Never will there be winter, when the shroud of joy falls away to display clearly the hollowed out corpses of the truly innocent, and the truly meek. Carved by our suppressors we have been, all for not fighting back! All for being different. Only to play the bad guy in their Broadway. When the curtain falls, we are left without company, out of sight of each other, not knowing, somewhere in the world, there are others like us. We are left to bask under the clouded skies, never to supply the earth with our last gift-the nutrients that lie dormant in our bodies. Never will we be allowed to produce flowers from ourselves. We are below that, for we twisted oddities will only corrupt the happy with our putrid stench. We will poison them with our flora.

But there is something they have missed. There is a secret we still keep from them. Our souls, meek and imperfect. Weak and wispy. Yet they pulsate within our gut, waiting until they are awakened by a dove’s cooing that becomes a flute, and a flute that becomes a trumpet blast.

So yes, dear reader, I never fought. I was silent, for I am frail. For I am strange. I was meek, and perhaps I was weak. Maybe, just maybe I still am weak. But my spirit pulsates within my gut, invisible it is, but invincible it is even more. I confess to meekness.