I love you recklessly.
Needs are waning.

My english course, also known informally as Disability Studies, has forced me to think critically about the disabled, being disabled, and the implications of disability. While most of it bores me throughly, some of what I have been studying just...fits. Maybe what is fitting is not clicking at the exact moment of studying, but sometimes you find yourself face to face with concepts you've only explored in the mind and read about in novels and papers.

I am sitting across from, at this moment right now, face to face with a disabled girl only a year younger than me. She is shorter than I am (and I am already below average in height) standing at, what I estimate, 4'7". We probably share a common weight, somewhere between 120-140lbs. She has trouble speaking, with words jumbled and mumbled and sentences not quite formed correctly. She doesn't have the same pattern of rising and falling vocals normally seen in English structure. I'm not exactly sure what is wrong with this girl, but she is clearly impaired. This girl across from me is disabled.

I never thought of her being disabled before, just a little slow. But I have re-evaulated what it means to be disabled (and that the fact everyone, if you live long enough, will become disabled [by accident, disease, or old age]). But now I look at her and realize she will never experience life in the same way I do. I don't know any details of this girl's disability except for what I see myself and have learned from years of knowing her and observing her actions. But I know she is behind me in school and in over-all life experience.

I know she has never kissed a boy (or a girl), never had a boyfriend (or girlfriend). She has never engaged in consensual sex, had a sleep over, or gone to a baby shower. She has never attended a party (college-type house party, not birthday) where she then got drunk and threw up in someone's yard. She has never driven a car. She has never had a job or moved out of her parents home.

Will she ever do these things? Yes, to most of them. Maybe not in the same fashion or at the same time as other people, able-bodied and minded people, do.

As I type this she comes up and smiles to me, wearing pink capris and a red sleeve-less shirt. Carrying an Olive Oil shoulder slung purse. Her hair is naturally wavy, blonde, and bouncing all over the place. Her teeth shimmer with purple braces and her presence is that of the clomping, broken, and mismatched flip flops on her feet. She tells me "Yeah!" to a question I asked her, if her mom was outside.

The last thing studied in my class was shame, sex, and the disabled body. Most disabled people have sex, enjoy sex, and find ways to engage in sex when the odds are against them. A lot of the time, this is a hard thought for abled people to really consider. Maybe because disabled people are thought to be less attractive, less sexuality desirable, less interested in sex or love, or even undeserving of such natural gifts.

I find it hard to image the girl in front of me, my own age but clearly not my age. She is still a child, held back by lack of appropriate teaching (her family is very poor) and the entrapment of her own mind and body.

I finally understand the frustration that I have read other disabled women write about. How as children, or teenagers, they saw their peers developing and moving forward while they were left behind. An example is Gwen from Jennifer Haigh's novel "The Condition", who has Turner's Syndrome...forever locking Gwen in a pre-pubecent, child's body. How disabled women can envy women who are "normal", who have breasts and hips and plump lips. I have always been taught to be happy with you body....but it isn't always so easy in a society where your body is considered ugly and freakish.

The girl in front of me is not locked in by her own body to be a child but it is her mind that is locking her in. She lacks skills many of us take for granted.

I, for one, have learned to appreciate being able-bodied and able-minded. Come to understand that because someone is disabled, it doesn't mean that they are a dysfunctional human or not 'normal' (in a social context). Being disabled can seem to some a tomb in which one can never escape, that you are forever imprisoned in pain and unhappiness, but that isn't necessarily true.

Do you remember the winter darkness so sick and dying with silence? The silence we still shuffle back and forth to one another.
Do you remember the spring lightness so sick and dying with silence? The silence we still shuffle back and forth to one another.
Do you remember the summer heat so sick and dying with silence? The silence we still shuffle back and and forth to one another.
Do you remember the fall breezes so sick and dying with silence? The silence we still shuffle back and forth to one another.
Do you remember the winter rains so sick and dying with silence? The silence we are shuffling back and forth to one another.


You were happier without me.
You were happier without me.