#FBF

I first noticed my imminent adulthood in an abandoned hospital bathroom. I had a cousin who contracted spinal meningitis as a toddler and my parents funded the majority of his recovery. During this time I spent most of my weekends with my grandmother at the children's hospital while my parents were away. I stayed bored and often found myself exploring places I probably shouldn't have been. One day I took what was left of my amputated kin along for the ride. I pushed his wheelchair into a wing of the hospital that had been closed for years. The walls were a sickly green, decorated with mosaics haphazardly glued by special needs children years ago. The halls smelled of stale sickness, and every step I took brought a tinny echo back to me. Our voices seemed like screams in the vacant halls. And even though it would be a while before I saw a place like this in the movies, I still felt a fear that something wicked could jump from any shadow. I realized I had to use the bathroom and just left him and his wheelchair outside of the avocado green bathroom door. It was there that I looked down and saw the most vile thing that could've ever happened in that wing. There they were, two, maybe three of them--course and black against the pale baby skin of my pubic bone. I couldn't stop looking at them. I knew what it meant but didn't know what it meant next. I didn't want to touch them for fear they would fall out, and I couldn't tell anyone because--well, because. I know I stood in that old bathroom for 20 minutes while my invalid cousin sat outside the door--legless, probably terrified or in excruciating pain. When I finally got myself together and came out, I told him I was shitting. He giggled all the way back to his room. When we were asked what we were doing for so long, he looked at me and said we had gone to the fountain outside. He thought he was keeping a grown up secret--that I had cursed, or maybe that I had shit. But what he didn't know is that he was helping me hold on to my childhood.