Dating : 5.5

I spent most of my childhood feeling like an adult trapped in a child’s body. I can vividly remember the terror I felt when I was five and a half years old in the courtyard of my elementary school looking around at my peers. They are all children, I thought with profound horror; they have no idea of life, they just follow a ball or they jump up and down skipping rope coming every morning to this horrible grey jail building like idiots!

In my defence, my school building looked like an actual jail building. I looked right and left and quickly left the courtyard. The depressing building had no colours, no drawings were hanging on the dirty walls but just faded yellowish maps with USSR posing still intact taking over the two thirds of the map. The large corridors where dim-lit with flickering halogen tubes and the bathrooms smelled of urine and bleach.

A bright green door appeared inside they were kids drawing happily. I recognised one of my younger friends from the neighbourhood that waved frantically at my side. I clearly then knew that this room was the kindergarten and I was a first-grader but this did not stop me entering. I grabbed an empty paper sheet and some coloured markers and joined the others eagerly. “Are you a new one dear?”, a pleasant voice interrupted me. I said innocently like a lamb that I was. After all, I was new to the school so that wasn’t exactly a lie.

Later looking at the books in my school bag she realised I belonged with the first graders. She was still very kind even after discovering my deceit and helped me go to the right room. Before deserting me there she added pleasantly that I was always welcomed in her class but only during school breaks. As she opened the classroom door I peered inside with horror at the grey pencils, the lined blue notebooks, the matching tables, and the twenty-six uncomfortable wooden chairs.

The teacher there was extremely overweight and wrinkled in a way that skin on her neck was folded in multiple dimples. Her austere voice barked to all of us that the time of play was over and it was now the time to get properly educated for the next twelve years. Shit, I thought it was all a trap. First, you learn to talk and walk, to feed yourself alone with a spoon, soon a knife and a fork is forced on you. One moment you were considered cute the next moment you became a nuisance that has to behave itself. All you know is that you have to stop playing and spend twelve years in a grizzly jail like this one.

Hastily I sat by a girl with braided hair and a blue-green checkered skirt trying to make as less noise as possible. She looked as unsuspected as the other twenty-four children about the upcoming treacheries of adulthood. I looked despairingly in front on me; a badly painted crucifixion was hanging crocked above the blackboard. A sense of impending doom came upon me; I was five and a half and that was just the beginning of my sentence.