I was young. That’s all it was I think. I wasn’t ill or mentally out of it or just simply weird. I was young and when you’re young, things feel intense. I’m sure you all remember that intense feeling of anger and jealousy you felt as a kid, seeing your sibling getting ice cream while you didn’t. I’m sure you all remember that intense sense of injustice that you felt was done to you in that moment. ‘But you already had pudding dear, your brother saved it for later. For now’. Maybe, if you were similar to me as a kid you would scream and shout and scold about how unfair this all was. ‘If he gets ice cream, I deserve some too!’

I was dramatic, yes I’ll admit that, but I wasn’t sick. I was just a kid. Honestly, looking back at that moment during the years I have questioned whether I was normal or not. Sometimes I couldn’t recall the event without feeling an intense amount of embarrassment and other times all I felt was sorry for little me. Just as kids change into preteens and teens and eventually into adults, memory’s do so too. Now, 20 years after that… interesting moment, I feel peace. It’s bad. I know it’s bad. But it’s easier now to believe it when I tell myself that I was just a kid when it happened and that that was all that it was. I was just a kid. A child. Someone too young to understand reality. Someone too young to understand the consequences of her actions. Especially such far reaching actions.

I don’t think I ever meant to actually do it. Yes, I had thought about it. Yes, I wrote about it in my little six year old handwriting and my pink diary with a pony on the cover. But that was all still innocent, though I believe some people might already disagree with me there. They’re saying six year olds shouldn’t even think about those things. But I’d like to remind them that all kids are weird and random. After the no phase and the why phase you get a weird phase somewhere along the line. If you combine that weird phase with the intense all or nothing emotions of a child and you get the perfect recipe for such a tragedy to happen.

I don’t remember ever making the plan either. Maybe if I find that pink diary with the pony and can decipher my own handwriting, I can read if I actually thoroughly planned my act or if it was just a kind of in the moment thing. A moment filled with that intense childlike rage.

Honestly that’s all I remember, that anger, that rage. When I think about it now, it was the last drop. The drop that started the flood. The spark that ignited the fire. The maddening smile that I knew somehow was always followed by one of his so called pranks. They were never funny. And yet, as far as a six could experience love, I loved them. I loved him. So so much. Just like children feel anger and rage deeply, they feel love deeply as well. Or at least I did. And that hurt.

I remember always being the joke. The one people laugh at and not laugh with. I didn’t know that then, but if I did maybe I wouldn’t have acted the way I did. Maybe I wouldn’t be where I am today. If I understood that my classmates were children too, incapable of grasping the bigger emotions of life too, I wouldn’t have taken it so personally. If I understood that they were dramatic too… I don’t know. I was just a child. Now, being an adult and having access to all the words for every emotion I can possibly experience, it’s all so much easier. I can’t get back to my way of thinking back then. I can only recall what I did and all that followed. I can only read what I wrote in my six year old handwriting in my pink diary with a pony on the cover: ‘if he wasn’t going to love me, he wasn’t going to love anyone’.