I remember being tired that day. We were supposed to meet at Rock City before sunrise. I was still just a freshman and had not yet fallen prey to the habit of all-nighters like the upperclassmen, but the hour was still an early one even for me. I remember Ashley taking the picture with her phone. She was so full of energy; I don’t know how she did it. We were waiting in line for donuts after the singing had ended and she called my name. I was starving, but I smiled anyway when I saw her pointing the tiny camera phone at me. The picture came out well. It looked the way I felt it should.
Pictures of me never really look right. It’s so rare that one actually captures the way I feel. Most of the time my face is locked into some poor facsimile of me. I look fake and incomplete. I tell people all the time that I’m not photogenic. I guess what I’m really telling them is, “That isn’t me. Please don’t think that’s me.” But that’s life. Things rarely come out well.
Ashley laughed when she saw the picture. She had to cup her hand around the screen because the sun, which had only minutes ago been below the horizon, was now blazing happily and throwing glare over everything. Ashley has a beautiful laugh and when she smiles her cheeks bunch up like apples on either side of her face. I remember the sound of our voices that morning. I felt like we were singing the sun awake. For a moment, letting myself imagine a little too much, I thought that without our singing the sun wouldn’t have risen.
The donuts were really sticky and I loved them. I got the glaze all over my mouth and spent the next half an hour occasionally licking my lips like a hungry animal. I loved that day. It is what I consider the beginning of my time at Covenant, the place I call my home now. This beautiful castle of a college built on top of Lookout Mountain is so different from the island where I grew up. It overlooks Chattanooga and sometimes, when I watch the city at night, I feel like a deity on Olympus. During the day my classmates lounge on the soft carpet of grass between the buildings and it’s nearly impossible to walk from one place to the next without being hailed by a friendly face.
I remember other beginnings, other than the day we sang the sun awake, too. There was the induction ceremony on my hall, for example. No one called it hazing because we freshmen were allowed to give as much as we got, and we gave a lot. Or the first time I drove onto campus in a borrowed car, alone, and watched other students wish goodbye to their parents. My mother had been forced to leave me four days early in a hospitable stranger’s basement because of a hurricane striking our home in Florida. But the day this picture was taken would always seem like the real first. It was the first time I felt like this was going to be a different place from anywhere else I had ever been.
My smile in the picture is misleading. I look so brave there, but in reality I’m a coward. I struggle with speaking in public and I shake when I walk into places I’m not familiar with. I’m always getting lost and I’m perpetually worried about everything. But I look strong because I remember feeling brave that day. I felt like I could have carried the world on my shoulders, even if for just an instant. I felt like this group of people, all of the students I had thought I knew, had suddenly become family. So even though I was exhausted my smile is one of the nicest I’ve ever produced.
My family at Covenant is very important to me. Truthfully, family has been the most important thing in my life since I first understood the concept. There are varying types of family, but before college it was always my parents, their parents, and my two brothers. Everyone else was an outsider, someone who couldn’t possibly understand me. Truthfully, I was a very hard person to understand for a long period of time. Where many people are trying to come to grips with reality, much of what went on in my childhood was brought about by me trying to come to grips with society. I was not social and society did not like me. It could never get an accurate picture of who I was. Every time it tried to capture me in still life, I would move or blink. To this day I refuse to stand still against scrutiny.
And so I was labeled many things as a child. When I was an infant, I was healthy. I ate, I cried, and my bowels moved regularly. No one could have asked for a healthier baby. Once I began to walk and talk, I was brilliant. I spoke clearly, solved complex problems with ease and wandered around everywhere. It was nearly impossible to keep up with me and my poor parents had to chase me many a time as I struck out on my own, determined to explore this dangerous world they tried to protect me from. My curiosity knew no bounds.
Once I entered school, though, the adults, those illuminati for which the whole world is laid open like a book, decided I was retarded. Teachers had no time for someone like me. I was always moving and doing. If I finished my work, I would wander off to build things or pull things apart to reconstruct them as I saw fit. I would chat with the children next to me. I would spin in circles until I got sick because I needed something to do.
“Alan, you were not a normal child,” my mother once said to me. “We all knew you were a little different.” I didn’t react to her saying this. Silence is a much better conversation tactic with my mom than speaking. She will fill the empty space with the rest of her thoughts. Eventually.
“There was that one time,” she went on after a few minutes of nothing, “that I had to come get you from Sunday school and you were separated from the rest of the class. You were in a corner, on one of those spinning stools, and you were just whirling around and around, as happy as can be.” By this point in the story my mother is grinning broadly. I love her dearly and I especially love that she not only puts up with my eccentricities, but also likes them. “I asked you what you were doing apart from everyone else and you just looked up at me and smiled so big and said, ‘I’m in time out!’ like it was the greatest thing in the world!”
It wasn’t until first grade, after two years of my poor mother being told I was mentally handicapped, that someone finally noticed that it was because I wasn’t being challenged that I was acting out. I was reading at a high enough level that my skill couldn’t be measured by grade. My critical thinking abilities were on par with students in high school. So society sat me down again, set up their camera, and tried to take another picture.
I became gifted. To be honest, I would rather have been retarded. As a result of being gifted I was separated, compartmentalized, and segregated with other students of the same intelligence quotient as my own. We were called Gifties. It was not an affectionate word. We were teased, beaten, laughed at and scorned. Even so, as Gifties we were told that one day we would mean a lot to society. One day our lives would be worth a lot to the world.
I discovered my worth as a Giftie the day a student I had never met nor spoken with paid an oversized kid named Brandon to choke me until I was dead. The price for my death was five dollars. Needless to say I managed to survive. I placed my hand at my throat and protected my airway until Brandon got tired of my wiggling.
“You didn’t choke him!” whined this strange boy, his shaved head bobbing somewhere around Brandon’s navel. When I read the word “sniveling,” I always think of this boy. “I want my five bucks back!”
“Fuck you,” was all Brandon said. It was all he had to say. The argument was over. I took satisfaction in the fact that the student who wanted me dead never got a refund.
As a Giftie I was special and unique, but also very alone. When the only peers you can trust not to hurt you are just as difficult to understand as yourself, life is a struggle and anything can force the rift between friends even wider. For me it was the way I acted out in class.
Inevitably during class my hand would find itself lifted proudly skyward, attracting strange looks from the people around me. Other students, when they raised a hand, would often only raise it half way, placing an elbow on their desk, as if afraid to let other people in the class see their arm waving above some imagined line the room’s atmosphere. I always raised my hand as high as I felt like, not because I was eager to answer, but because I was often not paying attention to what was going on around me. My questions were always complex and most times didn’t have an answer.
“Mr. Braddock? If a solid object were being swung so that one end is moving faster than the speed of light and the other is moving slower, would there be a definite line on the object where it is aging differently due to faster-than-light travel? Or would it be a more gradual change?” I asked once, unashamedly. Mr. Braddock had frowned and the old lines on his young forehead deepened.
“Alan,” he responded sternly, “Why do you ask questions like this and then score C’s on my tests?” No one likes a smartass.
Every day was a battle with my image. My awkward fumbling with social norms left me blurred. The picture Ashley took on the mountain represents the beginning of a time when I first felt like I was finally in focus. I remember suddenly feeling like these singing people, sticky-fingered and laughing all around me, were my family. I had heard them pray their fears out loud. I had seen them crying and laughing and likewise, they had seen my heart laid bare. None of them were perfect, and many times they would hurt me with their actions or words but that is what sometimes happens in a family. What mattered to me was that I did not feel ostracized for being different. What mattered to these new family members was that I was human and had a story to share. And so I remember that day as the beginning of my life outside my blood. The first time I felt welcome anywhere outside my family.
I really like my smile in this picture.