I Remember

what it was like to be new again. That was just two years ago. I remember how angry and frustrated I was, how confused and stressed I felt, how thin I got.

It was scary.

It still happens to me. Quite often. Gari told me I was entering a new phase that's why all this is happening to me. In my opinion, it's a lot like shoes. It hurts really bad when you have to break in a new pair of leather shoes--well, any shoes for that matter. I remember when I was still in grade school--everyday for two weeks, I had to wear band aids where the shoes scuffed at my skin: behind my foot, below the ankle, on the protruding bone below my pinky and big toe, the corns on my second and middle toes. ANd these were on both feet.

I remember how painful they'd be. It was a pinching, sometimes searing, pain. The soft white skin would peel off and then you'd see the second layer, now pink and raw, and the more you tried to walk the more it hurt and then it would start to bleed. And you couldn't walk anymore. Sometimes taking your socks off made you cry because it would stick to the wet, raw wounds.

Sometimes I got pretty shoes, nice and pointy with a dainty design somewhere. THere were days when all my mom could afford were those horrendous-looking boys' shoes that I absolutely detested. But I couldn't do anything about it. I didn't want to go to school barefoot.

Life's like that sometimes. When you have to enter a new chapter in life, it's like breaking in a new pair of shoes. Sometimes you're breaking into something nice, sometimes it's ugly, but you have to do it.

Then the wounds come. And you have to force yourself not to feel the pain and keep going. Sometimes you run out of band aids. And sometimes because of that you have to go on barefoot.

But you go on.