Solitude vivifies; isolation kills.
 - Joseph Roux


    Isolation. I have looked up the definition of isolation so many times that I have since memorized it and discontinued the use of a dictionary for said word. I have three favorite definitions of the word:

1. To render free of external influence.
2. To set apart or cut off from others.
3. To place in quarantine.

    In my life I have been quarantined. As a result of my quarantine I developed a sort of “oddity complex” which set me apart and/or cut me off from the norm of school society. Thus, I was eventually rendered free of external influence and therefore left to form my own identity free of cliques and peer pressure.
My own identity in itself is a mystery to those who do not know me. In all actuality, I am a very passive, easy-going guy, so when my friends and family ask me why I am so violent, I just stare at them blankly; I never understand that question. Is it because of my clothing? Is it because of the thirty percent of my music that is heavy metal? Is it a residual image from foregone times? To some I come across as arrogant, to others angry, and still yet to others I am the sweetest, happy-go-lucky guy they have ever meant. These very perceptions are as much a mystery to me as my true identity is to them.

    Second grade was not a pleasant time for me. Just to get to the point, I was kicked out of school and transferred to another elementary school in our district. Everyone thinks I was a bad kid, but I just wanted my parents back at home.

    My Father had been gone for something like eight months (and eventually a total of eleven) and my Mother had gone to visit him for two weeks. Because I was a child used to both of his parents being there, I was quite upset.

    You must understand that my Father often went out of town on business, but the periods he was gone for were no longer than two week. Besides, I always had my Mother home with me, so there was never really a my-parents-are-gone shock experience. However, my Mother left after my Father had been gone for such a long time; they sent me next door to live with my Grandparents until my Mother returned.

    I wanted them to come home; I hated them being away. So I tried everything possible to draw them back to the United States.

    There was a white room in Jeffery Elementary School that they used to lock you in, fire code aside, if you were being unruly.
A male teacher caught me outside once. I had run out of my class with Ms. Batson and out onto the playground. A teacher had seen me and chased me down, basically tackling me to the ground. He carried me over his shoulder back into the school, past the glass computer room, past a large group of fifth graders, and into the white room. That is when he said it:

                      “You don’t deserve to live.”

    I don’t think anyone believed me then and I don’t know or care if anyone believes me now, but he said it. Before he locked a little second grader in a white room with no windows by himself, he told me I didn’t deserve to live.
This is a horrifying thing for a young child to hear. I’m sorry, but I did have a grasp on what life and death was by the second grade and knew exactly what he was alluding to.

    I ripped a tile off of the wall and pressed the “open lock” safety button in the doorknob and escaped.

    That same teacher eventually transferred to the Middle School while I was still in attendance. I saw him and hated him. I hated him for standing there in front of me, for looking at me and not realizing who I was (after he had passed such a strong judgment on me), and for breathing in my exhaled carbon dioxide. There he stood, in front of room 102, every day after the fifth period bell. He looked like a cross between a Navaho Native American and a bad, post-80s record executive complete with slicked back hair that fed into a ponytail.
Every time I passed him it was like that old cliché of a train wreck: I did not want to look, but I could not look away. Each time he would notice me he would nonchalantly return my (what I thought was) hateful glare with a smile. I thought to myself “in four years he could have changed, maybe he is not a jerk anymore”, but I could not see passed that one small phrase he said to me. I wanted to give him a reason for saying that to me, I wanted to gouge his eyes out with a pencil or tie his little pony tail to the ceiling fan in the cafeteria.

But, I am not that way anymore; there is no vindication, there is no hate.

    I cannot describe what I felt when I was locked in that room; the room itself changed from time to time. Sometimes, there would be a conference table with ten chairs in the room, so then I could sit down in a chair. Other times there was nothing in the room at all, so I just sat in the corner or against a wall, or paced around the room a bit before someone would come to retrieve me.
The most prevalent thought in my mind when I was in the white room was “when is somebody going to let me out?” It seemed like hours upon hours, but I was in second grade, so maybe it was just an hour or so at a time. Isolation makes you do things you would not normally do. Given that I was a troublemaker during this point in my life, it was inevitable that I would cause some sort of havoc. However, havoc (or actions perceived as such) and destruction are two different things. Never once up until that point had I caused serious damage to anything. However, now I was kicking the walls, throwing the chairs, and ripping tiles off of the wall.

    I had ripped tiles off of the wall to escape from the white room on many occasions. Why? For anyone, a second grader or otherwise, the room would have been scary; anyone held against their will in a situation that could be considered solitary confinement will feel this reaction. So, quite by luck I found that there were nails holding the tiles to the wall. Prompted by fear, over zealousness hyperactivity, and anger, I would remove the wall tiles, take their nails, and use them to unlock the door from the inside. Eventually, teachers would search me before putting me in the room, looking for paperclips or push-pins, but they never found anything.

    Should there be residual anger or frustration with people after such an episode? I suppose the old adage “forgive and forget” does not apply here so strongly. My Mother told me the other day, “If I could do it over again, that [the white room] would never have happened to you. That was a horrible, horrible thing they did to you.” But I do not blame her. We all have our troubles and she was dealing with some hard times: the death of her Father, my Grandfather, and my own Father being in England.
I see this as just a period of vast change for my family. As things were changing for my Mother, things were changing for me, for my Father, and consequently for my sisters in various ways; the 1990s were not good to us emotionally.

    Something had to have changed in me as a result of these periods in the room. Freelance designer/writer Jacci Howard Bear writes, “[the] nature of white: To the human eye, white is a brilliant color that can cause headaches for some. Too much bright white can be blinding,” she also says, “White is purity, cleanliness, and innocence.” Maybe this is where my headaches come from…from the hours I spent in that pallid, almost hoary quadrate; it was blinding.

    The room was blinding in the sense that I really have no happy memories of when I was a child. I remember in first grade that my teacher, Mrs. Grandy, took my Battle Troll Doll (kind of like a treasure troll on steroids) and threw it against the playground blacktop, breaking its head off. In second grade I remember hating my teacher Ms. Batson. Teachers often chased me around school, called me a trouble-maker (I was misunderstood), and I even recall two teachers holding me to the floor for half an hour waiting for someone to come pick me up from school.

    Now, I remember little, if anything else, from those days. It may be that the room brought out a side of me that stuck in my mind and pushed aside those happy memories I should have aside.
There are slight recollections of trying to impress kindergarten girls by “putting a push-pin in my skin” (actually, it was just penetrating my shirt). Also, I recall when I got leg surgery because of my Legs Perthes Disease. If those are considered “happy moments” then I suppose I do recall some.
Dreams, I feel, can be considered recollections as they are based upon images and memories that are both immediate and hidden. For years now I have not had a happy dream; actually, I may have happy dreams, but they always turn bad toward the end.

    The last dream I had, or one that I remember, took place on top of a man-made island (or what I thought was an island at the beginning of the dream) of some sort, towering above a “moat” with walls surrounding the entire structure. At first, I was on top of the island, walking across oddly shaped stepping-stones and making my way around aluminum railings. Some time passed and curiosity got the best of dreamland-me. I walked to the edge of the “island” and promptly slipped on some aptly placed water and plummeted into the moat below. For a period of what seemed like hours, I swam around in circles before I actually looked in any other direction other than straight down. When I first looked up, all I saw was a giant, red, towering monolithic structure; this scared me quite a bit. The color red can mean a few things: protection from evil, love, fidelity, revival, and, aside from the aforementioned positive symbolism, it stood for evil.

    Well, I probably do not need to announce it, but the color red stood for an evil quality in my dream. I swam toward the monolith and clutched one of the protruding railings with my cold, trembling hands. Now, the railings were not meant to make the climb easy and because of their slants I just gave up half way through and fell back into the moat.

    Freud may have an explanation for my dream, but I find no real meaning or excellent interpretation coming from my consciousness; odd dreams such as my red monolith dream have been an ever-present acquaintance to my sleepy-time rituals. I blame my dreams partially on horror films and partially on the white room. Why do I blame horror films? That is quite obvious, and since they are my favorite genre of film, they are pretty sure to stay no matter what. Now, why do I blame the white room?

    Well, all of my dreams, whether they take place outside, inside, or a combination of the two, take place in an enclosure. This may not seem odd, but what wooded area, six-lane highway, or strip mall do you actually know that is really enclosed by walls? Exactly.

    I stuck my hand under the door. The nice guidance counselor for some reason turned on me and put me into the white room again. I pleaded to the fifth graders coming back from gym class,
“Please, someone let me out. Just turn the knob, I don’t care who you are!”
There was a nice boy who opened the door for me; the students laughed as I ran out of the room and into the gymnasium. It was empty, but the sun was coming in through the windows and shining upon the few bleachers that inside the room. My mind wandered…what should I do now that I am out?
I went back to class.

    Ms. Batson took one look at me, grabbed my wrist, and took me to the principal’s office. She asked the principal if she let me out. The principal said no and they just put me right back inside.
There was a conference table in the room at this time; I suppose at some point when I was not in the room, maybe the night before or in the morning, some teachers had a lovely conference in the comfort of the white room.

    They would have let the air circulate through a crack in the door and through the ventilation shaft in the far right corner of the room. How lovely that would have been, to see the white room in some glorious state rather than the pitiful shell of a room it had become.

    I took a chair from the table and put it up against the door…I spent the last half hour in the room that day looking out the window at the children passing by.

    Optimism and belief are two words that run my life now. Without them I would be nothing. Looking back on second grade, I am glad it happened. This may sound odd because most people do not consider a grade school teacher telling a student that they do not deserve to live a good thing. But, how would I be today if it had not happened? I feel that a lot of my acquired values are from self-reflection and the realization that I do not want other children to go through what I did. Let it be known that a lot of children have greater hardships than I, but what I have gone through was emotionally and physically draining for me. I went from a happy child, to a depressed teenager, to a content adolescent. The rage is ever subsiding and the satisfaction is ever increasing.

    There is a purpose to my life, to everyone’s life, and we never have any real idea of what it is. Withal, I want to be remembered for doing something great, something that changed the world without having to use force. I want to make a difference without a white room; I do not want any more tiles ripped from the walls.

    Someone broke the window of my room. Maybe someone else was forced to stay in the room with bleached walls and tried to escape through the small, 1-foot by 1-foot window. Anyhow, the custodian or some crafty teacher used masking tape to close off the newly made hole in the door.

    This was the last time I was in the room. There were no chairs, no table, no window, two missing wall tiles, and a light-switch; I flipped the lights off.
Six-seconds after total darkness one of the secretaries came and told me to quit playing with the light-switch because it controlled the lights in her office. She bribed me with a deck of Topps baseball cards wrapped in shiny gold tinfoil.
There was a rave in my room until they could not take it anymore, baseball cards be damned.

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