A Humpty Dumpty World
328 Words
A Humpty Dumpty World
How I survived is a mystery. Sixty years later I still wonder what my life would have been if I’d let the boys at St. Sebastian’s have their way with me—I don’t mean this in a s****l sense, though s*x did play a part in my story. You’ll see soon enough. No, I mean something different, related to the random variables you brush up against in life that change your path and shape character, things quite separate from those genetic directions implanted in our DNA.
I’ve never spoken before in great detail about this experience, other than to say I’d spent time in an all-boys’ parochial high school. Maybe I felt guilty, that what happened was mostly my fault and that I brought it on. Maybe. Yet my story, unfortunately even today, is not unique. No, it is one shared by millions of children and adolescents who daily walk through a minefield. A path so strewn with obstacles that one misstep can literally be a world-shaking incident, a kind of seismic event.
I remember O’Riley telling me to try a little harder to fit in. He was the one I turned to when life at St. Sebastian’s became a Humpty Dumpty world. One visible crack and you’d had it. “You’re just not adjusting,” he’d say. “Give it time, Phil. You’ll see.” I thought O’Riley was a little man trapped inside a boy’s body. How could anyone be that mature at fourteen? I wasn’t. It took me time to figure the situation out, to understand what was going on, and to finally act to change my fate, and even then my actions could be considered, by some, more a type of cowardly withdrawal than any direct action on my part to make my life better.
Even Alice, when she followed that damn white rabbit down the hole, had the sense to know she’d landed in a world where normal, everyday rules didn’t apply. But I wasn’t Alice. No, it took me longer to figure it out, to put a name to what was happening in my Humpty Dumpty world.
- Writer
