Sleepless nights

Lately, Shawn has been thrashing around in bed at night. I don’t know what her problem is, but I do know that ever since she started her thrashing around, I’ve been having some trouble with waking up during the middle of the night. Do you think there could be a connection?

The one interesting result of waking in the middle of the night is that I tend to remember whatever dream I am having at the time. The one I remember from last night was of protecting a young woman who was being bullied, she was sixteen years old, blond. I believe this dream somehow stemmed from some poems I recently read by a young woman named Sam who I used to mentor. Her poems dealt with love, suicide, and other topics that I think tend to crop up in those early teenage years.

This morning as I drove to work, I was thinking about bullying, and how it has become a problem, leading to shootings at schools and other violent behavior. Of course, bullying has always been a problem. I was bullied at school, or rather, on the school bus. I remember another boy who was always threatening me and trying to steal my Swatch watch. I don’t recall if I ever told my parents about this. It was terrifying then. I still remember that boy’s face and hate him to this day.

I was also on the other end of bullying. I recall walking down a wing of my high school with some of my friends from the soccer team and one of them, Fergie, saw an unpopular freshman boy, picked him up, and put him in a nearby trashcan. We all laughed. Fergie would look for this boy every day, and managed to torment him for a few weeks before the boy smartly changed his route. Do I have to say that I didn’t do anything then, and that I feel guilty now for not stepping in?

When I reflect on this memory, I see a classic bullying relationship that still plays out to this day: the jocks and the nerds. Naturally, I wonder what happened to that boy. He is probably about thirty years old. I empathize with him, I wonder if he was angry then, if he hates us even now. Maybe, like Sam, he was a good poet. Maybe his being a poet saved my life.