Since I was a kid I shied away from people, especially strangers. I was never especially comfortable in public, even with my family. From my earliest memories I simply did not like other people. The way they spoke to each other and treated each other always seemed wrong.
I was on the bank of the river we lived near fishing with a long branch I had tied a fishing line to when a barge came through. There were several people on the barge, obviously drunk. At the front of the barge a man was yelling at a woman, calling her names I won't repeat and then he started hitting her.
I was shocked by this behavior but the people on the barge ignored it and continued on with their revelry. As it floated out of my vision nobody on board had lifted so much as an eyebrow. As scandalous as I thought it was at the time I would learn that this had become normal.
“Life is tough.” my dad would say often “That is just how life is.”
I soon learned that other children behaved the same way as the adults. They didn't know any differently, they had never seen anything else. They never imagined there might be a different way to live their lives. I couldn't explain my doubts to them and I did not want to hang around people who talked and treated people like dirt.
So I stopped making friends. I used my imagination to create a world I would want to live in. I was always playing in the dirt behind the house, or in the woods or at the river. My parents never checked on me, never showed much sign that they cared about my well-being. I did hurt my wrist falling out of a low tree once, and my dad only said “Life is tough, get used to it.”
Occasional a group of other children would find me and pick on me. None of the adults who were around, when they were around, never cared enough to look over what all the commotion was about.
Mother spent most of her time in the garden and kitchen. I chipped in and helped once in a while but she hardly wanted to talk. Once I decided to help her make soap and she warned me about the dangers of lye. Once. It crossed my mind to wonder if dad would have even warned me.
Occasionally I turned on the radio but there were usually only lectures on tolerance and egalitarianism and the newscasts were so generalized that listeners did not know what they were about. The other stations we could pick up on the cheap radio were “music” channels full of shrill screeches and banging noises and vulgar lyrics. There was never anything worth listening to.
Crime was rampant. It wasn't ever reported on the “news”. My dad once, while drinking, got into a melancholy mood and sat on the bank of the river with me. He talked about how he tried to get “away from the mess” by getting away from the cities but that the cities followed. The cities emptied out, anyone who had the slightest ability to leave had packed up and left. That which remained were the “worst kinds of people.”, but then he added “Until soon afterward.”