Sorrow

Someone sent me a thing Ann Landers said -- about people who drown their sorrows forgetting that sorrow knows how to swim.

It made me laugh.

Yeah, I know. It wasn't meant to. But I'm a bitchin' swimmer. Way better than sorrow ever hoped to be. Way better.

No, seriously. I am.

I get suffering. I've been there:

4th grade: All the way home (I was a walker), some jackass and his buddy making machine gun sounds at me, because they found out my family was German. (I had no idea what the hell they were doing or why, but for the very first time, I understood that being German wasn't the awesomest thing ever.)

7th grade: Gym class. Er...I don't actually need to go into detail, right?

9th grade: Another jackass, a different jackass from the 4th grade jackass (I assume), this one spit on me. Other jackasses called me names for no reason (well, other than I wasn't tall and blond and beautiful) or felt free to call out insults about what I was wearing or had done to my hair or... whatever the wrong thing of the day was that day.

College: Yeah, I know. The bad shit is supposed to go away in college. And some of it did. Except for the part about my grandfather and two friends dying in the space of just a few months.

Today, I thank the jackasses and the bad shit; they taught me to swim, after all. They taught me that no matter how deep the wounds, no matter how much water is forced into my lungs, in the end -- I'm still gonna float.

.