All my life, I have kept things to myself: my dreams, my nightmares, my fears, my hopes. When I started second grade, I was bussed to a different school. I cried and pleaded to be able to go to the old school. I was so distraught that my mother took me to the old school on the first day. There were lists on each door with the names of the students in each class. We went to all the second grade just been trying to find a way to show me I had to go to the other school, or maybe a little bit of her was hoping my name would have accidentally been left on one of the lists. Because she knew my heart was breaking. I didn’t tell her why, maybe she knew that too, but I never told her.

Every decision we make, changes something. It may be minor, or miniscule, with no consequence to the rest of our life. But even the smallest decision may have great impact. If you take a different way home one day, maybe nothing, or maybe you miss the car that ran the stop sign. Or you go the same way, but slow down for a minute to look for a particular CD, and the car that ran the stop sign misses you. Or I refuse to suck up to the boss, and when layoffs have to be made, I lose my job. I didn’t decide to quit, but I made a decision somewhere along the way that caused that.

One reason I didn’t want to go to the new school was Dana. She was a girl in my first grade class. Most of the time I played alone at recess; I have never been good at meeting people. But sometimes I would play with another kid that had the same name as mine. One day he was picking on Dana while she jumped rope, and she said “I’m going to tell on you, Jimmy”. She looked at me and told me “not you, him.” She was always nice to me. I had a big crush on her.

I knew that going to another school meant I would never see Dana again. Not that it would be a long time, or that I might see her somewhere besides school, but I would never see her again. That made me very sad, and that’s part of why I cried, but there was more. Even at seven, I understood this thing about any decision changing other things. I knew that my whole future was just altered in some big way. And this time, I had no choice in the decision. Nothing I had done in my short life could have changed this decision. Nothing I could do as a seven year old could undo it. I had no control over what I felt was not a good decision.

When I was in 6th grade, I tried to share my loss of Dana and how decisions change our lives with the new girl I had a crush on, Ann. She was the smartest girl in the school, but she didn’t get it. She said I was living in the past. Image one 12 year old telling another 12 year old that they are living in the past. Maybe she’s right. Seems time doesn’t pass for me like it does for other people; memories of Dana and of Ann are just a moment ago to me.

But I’m not living in the past, I just try to understand it, and use it to make decisions in the future. And sometimes people don’t understand my decisions, so I still keep my reasons mostly to myself.