MEMOIR
Those Less Than Perfect Moments
Adolescent angst, eternally deferred
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I’m looking askew at that time I got fifteen-year-old giggles at an important school event. Together with my best friend (both of us regarded as excellent representatives of the English department), I had been chosen to read aloud in alternating lines a serious, race-related poem by a really quite cool older student.
The reading started poised, and my friend and I stood shoulder-to-shoulder, in all ways, facing a full and bright hall, but within a couple of lines my voice tumbled off into a suck of air and my friend’s started up with a nose squeak, and on it went as rows of eyes congealed in a silent watch of our floundering performance.
It was my first experience of having nowhere to hide when things crumbled in a very public way. I don’t know why, but despite the shame afterwards, it broke up some fallow ground, unceremoniously, and straight down the middle.
I had let down a fellow student who just happened to be the only black person in a very pale school, by undermining their political poem with hiccupping hysterics, when really it was just the weevil-eyed, wimpled gaze of the nuns in the front row that had tipped seriousness into silliness.
But from this I realized that you can accidentally do the wrong thing in the eyes of the world (and at fifteen, a hall full of peers, parents and teachers is the ‘whole world’) and survive it.
I didn’t ‘die’ of embarrassment, as I’d have predicted at the time, and neither did I die when I accidentally knocked over a huge, strapping wooden door in the school hallway, wham, straight down, impossibly loose (or me, impossibly strong); or when I sellotaped a large wad of TCP-soaked cotton wool onto a chin spot and had to go to classes with a bright red, circular burn, as well as the invincible mega-spot.
Just three randomly resurfaced, kooky, teen-sized curve-ball moments that quietly and subtly arced the onward march of days after them. Accidents happen, after all, and so do emotions.
2024 Mimosa Days