Hopscotch…A Jump in Life 20

*Before…

They all kind of are gone after that and I’m kind of just sitting there wiping the odd tear leaking out of kind of like relief. There’s some more answers and there’s people that kind of sort of know me and stuff but more importantly they want to know me.
Sarah me…Well I think I mean that they mean me; the whole thing was on Shawn’s page and all.
And Adam…wow…Shawn stood at least for something.
I really can’t like see me being brave though, crazing and wanting to get hurt maybe but brave?
Though it’s kind of nice to know that Shawn wasn’t like an ass to people.
And I am tired…and tomorrow is likely going to be a busy day and things.
I wipe at my eyes again and power down and close my laptop and try and get comfortable and get some sleep before Mom or the staff show up for stuff tomorrow.

*And Now…

It’s the smell of food that wakes me up, well what sort of passes for food in their opinion but it’s the smell of the little thingy of brown sugar that wakes me most. I don’t think I’m really a sweets person but there are certain things that I know that I like the smells of that invoke a thing.

Smell Umami.

And the smell of hot porridge with brown sugar getting melty and warm from it is one of those things.

I’m kind stiff from last night and I’m more than a little blurry and bleary and I do manage to sit up and get comfortable as the food service people bring me more cream of wallpaper paste and there’s a really, really softly scrambled egg that kind of looks closer to runny and there’s applesauce and milk and coffee.

I thank her and sniff the coffee with a bit of contempt.

It’s that packeted stuff that’s decaf and it’s pretty weal even for decaf and it’s just….I’m not coffee snob Tim Horton’s will do just fine or heck at this point corner store coffee that’s been going for like hours.

Yay hospital life.

And food.

As bad as the food is I do eat it and the eggs wouldn’t have been utterly bad if I could have had a slice of toast or something to go with it but nope not yet. The eggs are sort of the closest thing that they want to give me right now.

It’s been a couple of days… it kind of feels like I’m on a sort of baby food diet.

Or I’m suddenly a senior patient that got sent here from the home and they forgot to send my teeth along with me.

Okay that’s funny not funny, it’s a small hospital here and like a lot of them there’s a lot of people that are seniors that need care that are dumped off more or less as the stop-gap thing between getting into nursing homes.

I’m seeing a lot more of the harder side of older folks I think. I’m going to try and remember that kind of thing. I mean I sort of want to do something like that.

But the food is still really bleech.

They come about an half an hour after that and take the tray away and I thank them and that’s just kind of the right thing to do I guess since I doubt that they get a whole lot of thanks from people sometimes and I get up and use the bathroom and wash my face as partly a way to wake up more than getting ready for doing make-up or anything and then I go back to bed but not to sleep but more to have a place to sit with my laptop while I log in again and I look over my E-mails and Facebook things and there’s a few more okay comments and stuff rom people that I don’t know it’s really just more Likes than anything else and I actually spend time looking up my new friends.

Jo-Beth Long’s picture on her Facebook page shows a girl with long brown hair in those loose side pig-tails and big round framed dark glasses that look good on her. She’s a bigger girl not like tall looking but heavy bigger but still really cute and she’s seems to like sweaters and animals she really likes dogs and has a lot of those puppy meme pictures and she’s kind of a geekette too with some gamer memes mostly World of Warcraft and a few Whovian ones too.

And food, well recipes and stuff and clothes too. I kind of like it she doesn’t seem to be shy in things that she likes and she does a lot of “Droolz” comments and “Pretty!” ones too and that’s cool.

Trust me I think I’m getting to be a bit of an authority on being or learning to be okay with stuff that you like and being open about it.

Danny Singer’s page is a kind of the guy version of that and he’s a dark haired guy with long hair and his profile pic has him in a Slayer t-shirt doing those devil horns things and he’s…well he’s sort of interesting.

No not like that but there’s less booby girl pictures and memes on there than I’d have thought and there’s a lot of music stuff and bands and he and Shawn share a few likes in those things. That’s a good sign though he’s way more into metal than me and has band links there that I have like no clue as to who they are.

I still watch a few of the posted videos though more to give me an idea of the music and stuff that he likes and him.

He’s also pretty much into BMX and mountain biking and a lot of outdoors stuff and he posts a lot of pictures of him doing things like that with his Dad and Uncles and cousins. There’s a lot of him in dirt pictures and a few pictures of his injuries.

He seems pretty fun though I’m not too sure about some of the hunting stuff he posts that he’s done and stuff.

I know, I know I seem like such a girl about all of that stuff but I think it might honestly be more a me being a town kind of person and stuff.

It just sort of seems outside of my feelings that I have about like my comfort zones.

And then there’s Adam Keeler… Adam’s picture is almost what I’d been expecting but not. I mean I didn’t know what he’d look like but the kind of kid that gets bullied and sounds like a geek well I had a mental image in mind and Adam’s reality kind of fits it.

He’s black haired and it’s cut with a bit of normal like length in the middle and front and top of his head but he has a shave on either side of his head. Nerdy-chique glasses and he’s wearing cargo pants in the pic and a very oversized shirt from that super hero with the big lightning bolt, not the flash but the other guy…the one that’s sort of like Superman.

And he’s got serious fan stuff going on with his page and pictures from AnimeCon in Boston? And something called Toronto Fan Expo and they’re definitely the gamer and dungeons and dragons sort of crowds I guess and science fiction stuff too.

Okay lots of pictures and he’s in costumes and things too.

It’s kind of really odd and cute.

I mean I know I’m kind of a geekette from some of the things I was posting on Shawn’s page and especially on My LJ but I’m a bit more into stuff like books and shows and movies than a whole lot of this kind of thing, though Fenn and PK are into the comics and stuff from their posts and PK is into Harley Quinn a lot.

The pictures are still kind of awesome to me because I get to see what he’s into and that he actually goes out and does those things and that he has a good time. I think it’s cool that he’s doing that.

Okay he’s got a lot of Star trek and Star Wars things on his page with meme’s and stuff and he’s a huge bookworm and a movie buff too. Lots of Lord of the rings memes and there’s a couple of you tube videos that have me laughing and giggling especially “Taters”

I like some of the other pictures too that are of him at the bakery in the whites doing stuff and that were taken and posted by Mallory Keeler his mom from the comments and then there’s some of the really awesome stuff that they’ve made there.

A little part of me groans at the pictures of the baked goods and especially the cupcakes, they make specialty cupcakes from the look of them and to order ones as well sort of like ordering a cake.

He likes a lot of the same music as me with then lighter stuff like ‘Fun’ and ‘Great Big Sea’, ‘Hedley’, ‘Simply Red’ and others actually he has this whole thing with a whole lot of Canadian bands. And a whole bit on how that’s all he plays for music on Canada day.

I’m kind of still just looking between the tabs for Facebook and those for my Live Journal and still playing catch up when my Mom shows up with Dr. Johansen. I look up kind of surprised…

“Hey Mom, Doc uhm why are you here it’s Saturday?”

“I’m here to have a mini-session with you Sarah I said I wanted to see you every day until you’re released.”

“Oh I thought that you didn’t work weekends.”

“Well it’s considered rounds; I do see other people here too.”

“Oh…” Okay I kind of feel a bit Derpy but I suppose that there is patients here that she’d see. Okay yeah considering the amount of people that get depressed in hospitals and the like I can actually really see it.

Mom passes me a Tim’s coffee and I take it thankfully. “How was your night?”

“Touch and go, I had like a lot of trigger stuff that went on and then I kind of got over that stuff and started trying to be proactive.”

Mom looks at me. “Trigger stuff?”

I bring up the stuff on my computer and the things that I saved and stuff and show it to them both. Mom looks red faced and not embarrassed but like she’s really, really pissed off and Doctor Johansson looks at me. “So how do you feel about this?”

“I’m hurt and pissed honestly I don’t know these people I don’t have to take this stuff right?’

Mom… “Hell no.”

Doctor Johansson… “Absolutely not there’s no excuse for this kind of thing and I see far too much of it. You have these things saved?”

“Saved and with screen caps.”

“You want the authorities involved?”

I look at them both and honestly part of me doesn’t because there’s that whole sort of thing that bullying and people just talking crap shouldn’t involve the cops but at the same time there’s the fact that bullying hurts and bullying kills sometimes and even if they don’t do anything more with or to me the fact remains if I don’t do anything and I just take it then they think that they can do this to other people.

And like screw that. “Yeah, because if they’re doing this to me then who else?”

Doctor Johansson looks at us both. “Then I’ll make the call right now.”

Mom’s like… “The police?”

She shakes her head. “Not just them but the RCMP too, I work with mostly teens and young adults and we see a lot of this and the laws are pretty strict about cyberbullying now and if this stuff isn’t met head on and nipped in the bud it can turn very, very ugly once these characters pick up steam.”

I nod and wipe at a little bit of moisture around my eyes. That makes sense too I never thought just how bad stuff like this could snowball. I’ve seen enough hate online that’s just general bullcrap to imagine if some of those people thought of a specific target that they could get away with all of this hateful stuff.

I get some eye and lump in my throat relief by taking a few good drinks of my coffee and it does help and all.

Mom looks at me and I bite my lip a little. “Sorry for being a royal pain Mom.”

“Oh Sarah you’re not. Are you sure that you’re going to be okay?”

I nod. “I think so, I mean other than these neanderholes all the other stuff as it kind of turns out…Shawn…Shawn wasn’t really all that outgoing and stuff, he wasn’t really a jerkface but I…he…well we weren’t really a social animal.”

Mom nods and she reaches out and runs her fingers through my hair. “Goes with transition a lot I’m afraid, or from the stuff that I have read.”

“I still got to go through with it Mom, I have too it’s the only me that is actually real.”

She pulls me into a hug. “Yeah I know honey.”

We stay like that for a while and then Dr. Johansson comes back into my room. “Well they’ll be along as fast as they can so we just have to wait.”

And that’s what we actually end up doing and talking about Jo-Beth and Danny and Andy and how it felt talking to them and how things sort of had me feeling relieved over all the pent up angst over not knowing.

It’s not that long or it doesn’t seem that long before a police officer and an RCMP officer shows and we talk. It’s kind of a rehash of the things going on and the police officer is taking notes while the RCMP officer is asking me the questions and talking me though things and he knows his stuff like about computers but the stuff on social media too.

I never thought that I’d hear an RCMP officer use terms like “Trolling” and “Creeping.”

It’s pretty impressive too when he leaves and comes back with an RCMP laptop that’s just a black IBM with like official stickers on it but still. I get to see them copy the stuff I saved and do some kind of authorization thing that confirms like the time I saved them on my computer and then he has a tablet he plugs in with a report thing that I get to sign with one of those on tablet pen things.

It was sort of scary dealing with them and at the same time it was just all sorts of cool.

He has Mom sign the stuff for charges to be pressed if and when they can and he leaves with the police officer.

The town police officer was kind of quiet, I’m not sure what he was thinking or if it was like about me or me being trans or not. I really couldn’t tell and I don’t know if that’s just me in my head or it’s just a police thing.

I sigh and double hand hold my coffee as they’re done and Mom and Dr. Johansson are looking at me. “You want to go for a walk and clear out the ughs from all of this?”

I take a breath and a sip then nod. “I think so, okay lets go.”

Mom slips her arm around my back and we head out to do a few rounds round the hospital with her and my therapist.