Someday, One day

By: Charlotte Shum

Sometimes I catch them staring; waving their tiny fists at me, giggling in hushed voices. I try to ignore them, as you do, like when your Da turns the radio up too loud, and you can feel the vibrations through the terribly thin walls. It’s annoying, but not unbearable—what else can you do, anyway?

The kids snickering outside—watching through the window, standing on the street—point at my face. One of them pulls down their lower eyelids, and the rest laugh so loudly I can feel it echo inside my skull. I stand in my room and attempt to distract myself the best I can. So that once they get bored and leave I can close the curtains and cry myself to sleep in peace.

Sure, I get it, I really do. My eyes are a little funny. My aunt Sara says my mammy fell on her stomach back before I was a wee babe, and my pupils got all mixed up. When I asked my uncle Ronan, he grumbled that I happened to lose the genetic lottery.

My family doesn’t see a problem with it, not anymore; over the years, they’ve realised there’s nothing they can do about it, that pity and denial and revulsion solve nothing. But that doesn’t mean the others don’t.

At school, the normal kids always follow me around and call me names; the adults usually just ignore it. Once, Sister Ellis—the head nun—told the entire class they needed to be more delicate in treating my kind. I knew she meant well, but the way she said it made me feel pathetic.

I guess from the moment I was born I had a sign etched onto my face—an invisible one, one everyone but I could see. Sometimes, I wonder what the sign makes people think for everyone to stare at me with such obvious distaste and disgust.

Does the sign call me lame? Ugly? A worthless girl with no hope for a decent future? I think whatever it says is even worse—after all, they rarely change their minds after the first time they lock their eyes on mine.

Sometimes, I wonder what it would be like to be normal. With normal eyes and a normal face, and have a normal number of friends and a normal happy life. But then I crash back into reality—my head breaks through the clouds and plummets towards the cold, hard ground. I remember that wondering won’t do me any good; I know I ought not to think so negatively about myself like this.

Other times, I hope. I hope and pray that someday people will just ignore the sign on my face. That one day, they’ll learn to accept. That in time to come, this unforgiving world will become a fairer place.

(But I know better than to dream.)