2002-11-15 - 3:50 p.m.
When I was eleven, I went to the mall without telling my mom. When I called her later from the food court, she was mad and asked me, “Do you think the world revolves around you?”
I thought about her question for a beat, and answered “Yes, yes I do.”
She didn’t like that answer. Sure, at the time, I didn’t have enough training in Physics to substantiate my claim, but I was pretty sure I was right. In my entire 11 years, events had only occured when I was there to witness them. There was no proof that anything existed unless I was there to confirm their existence.
pizza didn’t taste like cheese and tomatoes until I tasted it,
Draino didn’t unclog drains until I poured it,
sitcoms weren’t depressing until I watched them,
cats didn’t feel like extreme cuddliness until I touched them,
wounds didn’t bleed until I created them,
Alicia Smith wasn’t fat until I made fun of her
and no one was able to prove to me otherwise.
I knew my school and its teachers only existed when I was there and would be sucked into world of non-existence when I went home. When I went I'd never been, they'd had to build it prior to my arrival so I would continue to believe the world was real. When I went to Los Angeles for the first time for a track meet, I could swear I could still smell the wet paint on the sand in the beach.
I had a desperate need to expose them, to have proof that nothing existed until it existed to me. To beat them, I thought of the most random place I could visit, quickly bought a ticket to Tokyo under another name and did’t tell anyone. After I foiled a bunch of their plots to stop me from going, I ran down the terminal to my gate, only to be wrestled down to the ground by a Nippon Air stewardess who said she was conducting a security pat-down. I managed to throw her cute stewardess hat (a hat which, by the way, wasn’t cute until I threw it) into the Pizza Hut Express and I escaped as she scurried to find it.
I thought my 16 hour flight gave them a fair headstart, but when we landed at Narita I realized I was completely wrong. The skyscrapers were still just 2x4s wrapped in tin foil and Mt. Fuji was a paper mache blob. Fourteen people, no, they weren’t actual people, they were more unformed globs of Japanese flesh in kimonos, ran around frantically, trying to make the streets look like they were filled with 8 million people. They dripped skin on me as they ran passed, and that’s really nasty for an 11 year old. As they apologized for demolishing my worldview, I took a picture of them and mailed it to my mom with a Post-It attached saying, “So maybe now I can go to the mall without telling you. I'll be home soon, if its still there.”
