I met Anna when we were in Grade 2. Neither of us spoke English, she not at all and I only a little bit. Nobody knew I spoke any English whatsoever due to the fact I never spoke to anyone. She was from Kiev and we both spoke Russian. Our parents were friends, though not very close ones. She was a very filthy little girl and admitted to only bathing once a month at most. Her clothes were strange and looked like they'd been randomly pulled out of a rummage bin at the homeless shelter. She smelled even worse due to the fact that she frequently peed in her pants. I'd never had any friends before in my life and had rarely spoken to anyone except for my younger sister. Everyone in class immediately hated Anna, which was like an amazing miracle to me. I knew that the only way for me to have a friend was if my company was the very last resort. And now here, suddenly, was a little girl who everyone hated even worse than me, who couldn't even communicate with anyone except me. I bonded with her immediately because of this and I guess she must have bonded with me, out of necessity. It was either become my friend or remain a lone bully-target hated by everyone, and she had no choice.
At first I became her translator. If she wanted someone to pass the food at lunch, she'd ask me to say it for her or to tell her the word for it. I was absolutely in heaven at being needed by anyone for the very first time in my life. I felt the overwhelming urge to protect her and be needed by her. Now both of us were being incessantly bullied every day at school. This felt much better than being bullied alone. Because she felt ashamed at the fact that she peed in her pants every day, I began to bolster her confidence by peeing in my pants every day too. That way she wouldn't feel so different and alone. Being ostracized by everyone else, we began to live in a world entirely of our own creation. Our language began to evolve and drift away from any normal existing language, because we never spoke to anyone else besides each other. This was the creation of our secret language. "Real" language became a lying way to communicate with the normals who populated the earth, and we did that as little as possible. Eventually our secret language differed from "real" language in such important ways that the things we could say in our secret language couldn't even be translated into any "real" language. This is why we began to think and reason in the secret language, and came very close to losing all conceptual ties to the "real" world. Our secret world was the most real one to us, and the outside world was all a bad dream.
Our secret world was based on the novels of Narnia. We'd both learned to read English far earlier and better than we learned to speak it, and because we wouldn't speak English people were misled into believing we couldn't read it either. So we were able to read those Narnia books together despite the fact that no one thought we could read at all. This pleased us a great deal and we enjoyed our ESL classes in which the teacher would try to get us to learn the alphabet. We never let on that we were already reading English at a fifth-grade level, we just let the normals play their silly educational games with us. Our world was a magical world populated by evil spirits and a few good spirits who were in permanent battle against them. We felt that we were servants of such good spirits. Our God was Aslan. We took orders directly from Aslan at all times. We would know what Aslan's orders to us were by seeing his secret messages in the world around us. For example, if we took a book and read down the first letter of every line, a secret message would become apparent to us, and this message was from Aslan. Or we would listen closely to the rustling of the trees in the wind, and the Good trees, being servants of Aslan also, would transmit to us by whispers our orders from Aslan. Sometimes Aslan would leave "signs" for us which could take any form.
The main Evil spirit in Narnia is the White Witch. We were told that the White Witch had reincarnated on Earth in the form of the Nag Hag, who was Anna's live-in grandmother. The Nag Hag was a powerful witch who secretly directed all the other Evil spirits. She was in fact their deity, as Aslan was the Good spirits' deity. Therefore our job as Aslan's servants was to undermine, ruin, and destroy all of the Nag Hag's plans. Unfortunately, the Nag Hag was assigned the job of babysitter for Anna and her little brother. This was unfortunate for her because Anna and I had made a solemn pact to thwart her in everything she did - and we certainly worked very hard to be as disobedient as possible. This made the Nag Hag even more bad-tempered, which only proved to us how Evil she was and that our plans to frustrate her were working, and that our God, Aslan, was pleased with us.
We did many bad things to both the Nag Hag and to all the other normals whenever we could. For example, we would place one piece of poo in every cupboard in the house. Or we'd steal and destroy, in a magical ceremony, an item which was extremely important to a normal but which they wouldn't suspect us of taking. Their shouts of anger and dismay pleased us greatly, and richly rewarded us no matter whether the normals punished us for doing such things. Their punishments simply made us martyrs in the Land of Narnia. Much of our free time was spent thinking up such plans of defiance and revenge and carrying them out. Amazingly, nobody sent us to see child psychologists or even tried to get us any counseling.
Meanwhile, between grade two and grade six, Anna's and my behavior became stranger and stranger. At this point I was sharing all my clothes with her because hers always looked like they were fresh out of a garbage dumpster, and smelled very bad. Neither of us related to anybody besides each other, making one another's company of the utmost importance. In fact, it became the only thing that mattered at all. I floated through life like a ghost, neither being seen nor heard; but in the company of Anna, I became real, and the world became real.
In Grade six, my parents moved our family across the country much against my will. This shattered the last traces of trust I had in them. Despite no longer having any companions whatsoever, besides my younger sister, who was a famous snitch and could therefore not be told anything or confided in, I continued to live in the land of Narnia on my own. I continued to think and sometimes write in the secret language, which was increasingly becoming full of venom and rage. I commonly went for days and days, up to a week, of never uttering a single word to anyone. I guess I could be called an "elective mute", but technically the problem wasn't that I didn't want to speak but that there was no longer anyone in existence who spoke my language. I began to spend almost all my time outdoors, in the many ravines and untamed spaces on the outskirts of Toronto.
This is when the only friends I had were the neighborhood dogs, and they actually used to get loose from their yards and come to scratch and call for me at the door of my house. Having no human models, I began to mimic and model the dogs' behaviors and eventually became very nearly like a feral child myself. After all, the dogs were the only ones who liked and accepted me, so why should I model my behavior after normals just because my body looked similar to theirs? Despite my behavior, which had become extremely bizarre, no one ever sent me to a psychologist, although all the teachers talked about me in whispers and avoided me as much as they could, which meant that I was left free to do anything I liked in school so long as it wasn't obviously disruptive. Due to my high IQ I was able to do homework and write tests with a perfect grade every single time, without even any effort, despite being in a dissociative trance during all lessons and school activities. They must have thought that because I got perfect grades and didn't bother anyone, I was alright, or at least they were able to ignore me, which I appreciated.
Anna's family also moved to my city about a year later and she phoned me. It turned out that she was living only a 45 minute walk from my house. I couldn't believe it. All this time I'd slept with a secret photo of her, believing I would never see her again, and now here she was. You could've knocked me over with a feather. And so we resumed our secret, otherwordly companionship, now both being in grade seven but attending different schools. Unfortunately we were both still the constant target of bullying at our respective schools, and were unable to present a united front. Anna and I studied many arcane arts under the counsel of Aslan, such as the art of becoming invisible in plain sight to evade bullies' notice. Being immune to punishment, failure to react to being publicly embarrassed, immunity from pain, and a deadpan facial expression no matter what I felt came from this arcane training. The cardinal rule of survival was being imperturbable and invisible.
Each day after school, I would take two inner-city buses to get to Anna's school, because her mother picked her up every day there after 6 pm and school let out at 3 pm. This gave us a good couple of hours daily to spend together. We shared absolutely everything, and at least for me the boundaries between me and Anna had long since become blurred and I felt as if I were a part of Anna. Like some identical twins, we spoke for each other, did each others' homework assignments, and in general would have posed as one another if we'd looked alike. You could say that Anna was my entire life, my only reason for existence, the sum total of my reality.
Around this time I had internalized Anna to the point that I could accurately behave and talk like her. It's difficult to explain how, but I was even able to take on her special abilities that I did not have by myself. She was a much better writer than I was and she was a brilliant mathematician. In her company, my mathematical and writing abilities took on her levels, despite my not being especially good at them on my own. Over time I was able to "take on her persona" even while not directly in her company, and this too elevated my abilities to her level. I began to live as Anna, with my own personality becoming secondary. In fact, the only time I've ever felt the emotion of "jealousy" was when a boy asked me to go to a party with him, and Anna wasn't invited. I felt an overwhelming surge of jealousy on her behalf and became immediately sick to my stomach, as if she had felt the rejection herself, even though she knew nothing about it. I had completely identified with Anna to the point that it would probably be diagnosed as a psychiatric illness. I had ceased to exist as a being in my own right and had become a part of Anna. People who knew us even recognized this as a fact, and joked about it by calling us both by the same name, a name composed of a combination of her and my names. People could sense that we weren't separate beings and even seemed a little jealous of that.
If you've understood any of the above, you'll realize that when Anna left I lost much, much more than a friend. I lost my world, myself, my entire identity, my purpose, my soul, my reason to exist, my reality, my religion. I couldn't have been destroyed more thoroughly than if my entire country had been blasted by a nuclear bomb and I was the only survivor, wandering alone in the ashes of ruins and wondering how to just die and finish the holocaust. And even despite that, I kept a deadpan expression the entire time and no one ever knew anything about it, having learned long ago that any sign of hurt or injury automatically makes you a target for normals.
04 Nov 2010, 10:55 pm
Dee 
