I’m in the fourth grade. A girl in my class doesn’t show up. She doesn’t show up for days. For weeks. There are rumors. I don’t understand them. She didn’t move away. Is she coming back?
Then one day she shows up. She’s not alone.
A man I’ve never seen walks to the front of the class and tells us he’s a psychologist. I don’t know what that means. He tells us the girl has something to say to the class.
She stands up at the front of the class. She’s the teacher now. She seems confident for a fourth grader. A little nervous, but hardly showing it.
“I tried to hurt myself,” she says. “I took a knife out of our kitchen. I cut myself.”
“I’m getting counseling to help me so I won’t hurt myself anymore.”
I don’t remember the rest of what she said. I thought she said she was coming back. I don’t know. It is the disappearance that I really remember. She walks away with the man. Where are they going? Will she be back?
The next day she’s not there. Or the next. Or ever. I’m still here. I still don’t know why she did it. Or where she went.
Did she try again? Did she succeed in her next attempt? Is she now a well-adjusted mother of three? Does she take Prozac? Is she the next Mother Theresa?
I don’t know. Google doesn’t even know. Does that mean she is as good as dead? If she’s Facebook dead, then she must be dead, right?
The man gave her back to us for a moment. Fourth grade girls cried. Fourth grade boys didn’t understand.Then he took her away. Do people always disappear when they walk away with the psychologist?
*Note* This story may self-destruct in a couple of days. If you want it to stay up, you may want to tell me.
This story resonates with me deeply. People pop in and out of each others lives alot these days, whether at the hand of a psychologist or not. Those of us who were intruded upon are left to deal with the ghosts.
Interesting how they brought the girl into class to give a small gesture of an explanation. On the one hand, how could any adequate explanation be given? And how could it possibly be adequately received? On the other hand, if no explanation were given, wouldn’t the conclusion be even more inadequate?
I doubt they would have brought her back to the classroom today. Today people just disappear. In business people disappear all the time. Did they get fired? Did they quit? Did they get a new job? Did they get some kind of illness where they won’t be able to go on? The answer is always the same “they’re no longer with the company.” I’m usually insolent enough to press for a further explanation. Nonetheless, they usually “cannot comment further”. This is supposed to be “out of respect for the privacy of the individual”, but really it is out of convenience for the person who has to relay the message and convenience for a company that wants to avoid an HR debacle that could translate into legal action.
I understand all of those concerns with respect that people have, whether dealing with a child at school, or an adult in a business setting, or otherwise, but at the end of the day it doesn’t change the fact that the person who disappeared was a PERSON who had an impact on OTHER PEOPLE, and when you just yank a life out of another life you have done violence to them. You knew that person somehow, you spoke with them, you had experiences with them. People don’t just disappear. Their disappearance is like an unexplained amputation. “We just had to take that” isn’t a satisfactory answer.
Good thoughts. The incident I wrote about really happened. I hadn’t thought about it for years until the other day. I don’t know why I thought about it. I think maybe it has something to do with a book I’m reading. My wife and I both went to grade school with this girl and I brought her up. She didn’t know what happened to her either. I said, ‘I’ll google her.’ Nothing came back from Google. Hence the story. I thought it was somewhat parabolic; I’m glad somebody besides me sees that. My wife actually laughed at it, which wasn’t my intention at all. Any time I start talking about Google she thinks it’s funny.
What I’m wondering is how many other kids in your classroom wondered what happened to that girl. Or how long after did they think of her? Are you in the norm for finding such vaporized relationships to be bothersome, or the minority? Do most people blink and then resume stepping, or does the situation burn slowly in the back of their minds, always ready to awaken the senses if ever one places a finger on it again?
I grew up in an air force base town. My dad was in the air force and then settled into a civil service job on the base during my childhood. This meant that I stayed in the same town and that a lot of other kids didn’t. Base kids.
Base kids came and went pretty often. I wonder sometimes what happened to a lot of my childhood friends. My wife and I talk about them sometimes. I had two ‘base kids’ that I hadn’t seen since about 4th or 5th grade contact me on facebook. Those were actually great conversations, probably the best I ever had on facebook – or at least the most fulfilling.
But you got used to people moving on. You had to. It’s like you said; something clicks and it awakens a memory, and boom, everything comes back.But you couldn’t linger because you were living in a revolving door in which you were one of the few people actually standing still.
Social media is interesting because it allows us to spy on old acquaintances without the burden of actually getting involved. That’s one problem. Another is that we obviously can’t actually be involved in everybody’s life. Proximity really does matter. It has to. It’s so proximate. But there is something romantic (in the old sense) of discovering someone or something you lost.
I’ll talk about this a bit when I write about The Great Gatsby. It’s all about haunting memories after all.