Papers. There are so many papers. Papers and words change the world every day. Without them human communication would be so very limited. In my time of living I had always respected them with such an enormity that can never be explained. They had always offered me a personal escape. With every work printed with such beauty and every sentence thought out beautifully, it was almost impossible to not be drawn. Thus I had always imagined pursuing a beautiful writing career and changing another person’s life. However, things do not work the way you want to. Instead I began working as an editor at a publishing company. It wasn’t exactly my dream, but it was pretty close. It was good enough for me.

Growing up was the most difficult for me because I wasn’t the beauty pageant queen nor was I the smartest kid in the class. I often spoke too much to the likings of my teachers. They used to have this dreadful chart procedure where they gave everyone a blank page with 30-31 squares to represent the days of the month. If you behaved that day you got a sticker. The way they determined whether you got one or not was through a system of cards. Everyone’s name was on the wall and underneath it were pouches with 4 different colored cards. If you forgot your homework or were doing something out of line you’d pull one card as a warning. By the end of the day if you pulled at least 1 card you were not allowed to put a sticker in your card of 30-31 squares.

Personally it was extremely difficult to go the week without pulling at least 3 cards. It came to the point where it became a habit of mine to just pull out a card. I actually began to like it despite everyone telling me that it wasn’t something to be proud of. I couldn’t satisfy my curiosity back then. If only I was that way now. I can’t even look at a person without being completely and utterly bored. Back then I would wonder why people did things or why some children came to school with their hair messy or why they were crying or laughing or jumping. I was eventually out casted over matters I was not able to control thus leading me to my personal age of observation. By becoming distant from people I understood them better.

I was able to judge by who was picking them up whether or not their parents were still together. I was able to tell through their lunches whose custody they were currently in or maybe the way their uniform was kept. Some children, however, always remained a mystery. They came in every day the exact same way they did before and got picked up by the same person every day. They were mostly quiet and kept to themselves not revealing any family history. That was when I truly began to grow fond of those who weren’t easily understood. That’s where my fascination for people really began. The others who were easily found out were uninteresting and had nothing to offer me in their personalities because they were just copies of child miseries.