Memories

Preparing my next speech, this time for tomorrow evening, I begun to dig: from where some of the phrases that flow out of me while I wrote it, come.

"I killed, not with a knife, I killed with my look."

First, I did believe it was triggered by an awful story I just read of an adolescent boy killed with 11 knife stabs. Only a few days later, while trying to remember why I looked as if I could kill to the children that I felt menaced me, that I did remember.

I was six and went to the school around the corner from our house. The first time we had a pause and went in the courtyard, while eating my sandwich two big boys, eight or so, come and took it from me. I went home, crying.

My father come from the countryside, in the mountains children did go everywhere with pocket knifes, and learned to use them early. He did buy a small one for me.

"If anyone menaces you again..." he begun.
"No way!" interrupted my mother.

Finally, my father taught me to fight like a street urchin. I loved it, tried it one and from then on, the other children in the school let me be. I thought, that was the reason I was not attacked any more for the next four years.

Only this morning, while trying to understand how and why I learned to look "as if my eyes would kill" I remembered my mother telling me, instead of the knife, if I just look menacing, no one would dare to attack me. I did it first to try out, it worked, then probably did not think any more about it but did it anyway each time someone hurt my feelings.

I did not realize most often I was doing it, I did thought myself submitting to the bullies in my school at 12 or 13, but while they mocked me (it begun the first day in that school because I did not speak well Romanian) my body language, my eyes were not mild at all.

Only ten years later, one of them I met by chance told me : "you used to look at us with lots of aggression, your eyes killed!"

All this come to surface, now, after so many years, because I was preparing my speech for tomorrow evening and trying to understand more about how come those words flow out of me when I begun to write, to tell.