Where the World Began

The world's inception came about from something rather inconspicuous. Nothing flashy. Nothing ornate and nothing loud. The world was a sanctuary, a refuge, and a place where I could feel comfortable in my own skin. My world began when I was a child, and not far from my home.

I learned very early on that children take great pleasure in casting out those who are in any way different than them. They are barbarous creatures and I did not typically have the strength to put up with such behaviour. I was the favoured victim for immature treatment by my classmates, merely because I was smarter than them, valued my schooling, and challenged the norm. No matter how often I was driven to indignant protest, the school continued to carelessly throw me to the wolves. I should have known better. For the longest time, my childhood was spent scraping by with a meagre handful of allies, even though they still didn't fully understand me. Queen Mary Elementary was, quite simply, an abattoir. I was eventually provided with a very sobering escape from my torment by a girl named Livia who lived in my apartment building.

Before Livia and I even knew each other, our mothers had met in the elevator. Their conversation had brought them to a shared interest of Livia and myself: Calvin and Hobbes. I owe my character to that comic strip. It wasn't long before I was up at her apartment and we were reading all the anthologies together.

Livia could share in my feelings of how difficult it was to survive in the world, but on a much grander scale. Livia had, and continues to live with, cerebral palsy. Her body was like a cage; she required the aid of a wheelchair to leave her apartment. Each movement would call for monumental effort. It was a constant strain to speak. She couldn't walk.

As hard as going to school every day was for me, I could barely imagine what getting up every day meant for her. Her life put mine in perspective. I soldiered on through the mess of my elementary school life with a new outlook. I was still a target for every bully and the butt of every joke, but I had gained some wisdom. You could say I was inspired.

Every single day, our meetings would continue. I saw them as a job to be done, something I wanted to do to make my world better. Finished with Calvin and Hobbes, we had moved on to other activities: her Nintendo 64. This video game console was a marvel of modern science. If we weren't playing Mario one day, it was Pokemon. It might have been The Legend of Zelda; it might have been Banjo-Kazooie. Whatever it was, Livia was a master of them all. Hands tightly knit around the controllers, we would spend countless hours in her living room almost every day. Livia was becoming less and less like my friend, and more and more like a respected teacher.

Months go by of our regular time spent up at her house. One day, I came by to find that one of her guinea pigs had given birth to a litter. Livia had kept two guinea pigs in the living room for years, a male and a female, and this was their second litter. One of the tiny animals from the furry brood jumped out at me immediately: a little black guinea pig pup. Its entire family was white and brown, and he was pitch black all over. When the guinea pigs all slept together in a river of tawny colours, he was the dam, the period at the end of their sentence. I fell in love with the squeaking, squealing creature. He was so very different from all of his peers, but that's why he was secretly the favourite of Livia and myself. By the time he was old enough to be taken away from his mother, I adopted him. The rest of the litter was given away to other families, but little Midnight, as I called him, came home with me. Midnight served as a constant symbol of the friendship between me and Livia, as well as a symbol to reinforce the importance of my individuality. Now I had two reasons to be inspired.

The world began in my apartment building, six floors up. Livia, Midnight, and I shaped it. We created our own place of solace, somewhere we could be valued. We built the world, and we ruled it.