Pit
August in Bellevue Idaho during the 1980s had the bluest skies I can remember. The sky was always a bit smaller than the places I live now, but on one particular day it was only directly above. The world around me that day was only soft dirt walls around me and there was a soupy cold mud soaking through my baseball uniform and congealing around my tightening skin. My skin has never fit me well. But that day was when it was confirmed that it didn’t belong to me. I was not the fat kid inside. I was not the weirdo who was supposed to be ridiculed and laughed at. If I was a freak, it wouldn’t have hurt so much. The mud pit was my first cave. It was the first little death that taught me how cold the world could really be, and how I should never ever trust the people I was trying to be. Baseball was a particularly strange element that made up the periodic table of my life’s beginnings. I was obsessed with baseball cards by the age of 8. I only know the year because of my collection. I st...