I see myself there, quietly folding my arms, standing outside. It was never too cold but the memories seem icy cool. I walked through the passages, askew and wandering, leading to the schoolyard. Our school was located in a redbrick Korean church building in Van Nuys across from the courthouse. Although I can only slightly remember specific school lessons, I remember vividly the schoolyard—the pouring of students onto the asphalt, the complete lack of grass, the conversations that reached fever-pitch, the nudging into lines that impatiently stirred as we readied for classes to begin.
The rooms were ghostly and empty, dank and eerie. There were four stories in the main building and the higher you traveled and went, the scarier it felt, the more ominous and lonely the hallways and rooms felt. Are all others’ childhood memories flecked with these images of haunted places? Was my fear—my being afraid of the dark and of ghost stories—mirrored onto the rooms and halls of this school building? On the occasions that I would be left alone upstairs, I remember sprinting away with goose bumps crawling all over my skin, running to the masses in the schoolyard. This is ironic for me: there aren’t too many times in my life that I would find solace in being surrounded by crowds of people.
And yet my childhood never seemed lonely - nothing close to the loneliness I would feel as an adult. There were my three brothers constantly pushing some thing or some idea into my face. My sister would talk to me when I was there even though she too was fed up with being helpless and wondering what life was. The classroom sizes were tiny. We all knew each other. Everything was the exact same until we hit puberty and became more and more familiar with our neighborhoods and the neighborhood kids they harbored. There was a window that would open up to the school yard which was actually a barren parking lot with basketball rims. Here, we would get our sugary snacks if we had some change. The older kids manned the registers. I never thought I would get that old. Time is an endless riddle to me. I'm thirty-four years old but I still feel like that boy who would never hit his teenage years only to be here asking father time to be a bit gentler. These stairs still harbor frightful, lonesome chills.
The rooms were ghostly and empty, dank and eerie. There were four stories in the main building and the higher you traveled and went, the scarier it felt, the more ominous and lonely the hallways and rooms felt. Are all others’ childhood memories flecked with these images of haunted places? Was my fear—my being afraid of the dark and of ghost stories—mirrored onto the rooms and halls of this school building? On the occasions that I would be left alone upstairs, I remember sprinting away with goose bumps crawling all over my skin, running to the masses in the schoolyard. This is ironic for me: there aren’t too many times in my life that I would find solace in being surrounded by crowds of people.
And yet my childhood never seemed lonely - nothing close to the loneliness I would feel as an adult. There were my three brothers constantly pushing some thing or some idea into my face. My sister would talk to me when I was there even though she too was fed up with being helpless and wondering what life was. The classroom sizes were tiny. We all knew each other. Everything was the exact same until we hit puberty and became more and more familiar with our neighborhoods and the neighborhood kids they harbored. There was a window that would open up to the school yard which was actually a barren parking lot with basketball rims. Here, we would get our sugary snacks if we had some change. The older kids manned the registers. I never thought I would get that old. Time is an endless riddle to me. I'm thirty-four years old but I still feel like that boy who would never hit his teenage years only to be here asking father time to be a bit gentler. These stairs still harbor frightful, lonesome chills.
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