When others wish to fly, I dream to run. I aspire to be on the track team, to hang out with girls; all I want is to be was normal. I am angry at the world, the doctors, and myself. Being confined to a wheelchair has taken its toll on me, as if being in eleventh grade isn’t hard enough. My interest in any type of social life has suicided and the same for my grades. My thin bones wobble and ache in my skin while my brain throbs in my skull. I have no passion, nobody to love, nor anything to live for.
I remember life before this life started, I can recall happiness and hope for a future. In my past, I could feel joy and jubilation, but those emotions don’t come as naturally anymore.
I rage when I see an unworthy, fully functional person drive into the handicap parking without a doubt that it’s meant for them or when other boys use handicap stalls as if we don’t exist.
People have offered their aid but only in a joking and daunting manner. The audacity of the people I am surrounded by amazes me; no one knows just how lucky they are.

I despise the constant supervision that I require. It’s a way for people to pity me. I hate being pushed in a lame piece of equipment; if I could just walk, I could free myself. On an average day, I drag myself out of bed into my prison, the “wheelchair,” and push myself to the closet. I used to pray every night and plead that when I woke I would be able to jump out of bed and run down the stairs, but a couple years ago I gave up asking. A normal life just isn’t the one for me, I guess.

When I was a younger child my legs worked, not well, but worked nonetheless. I could hobble into the sandbox and limp back out. Whether I got stares or not, the youthful me didn’t notice.

Progressively, I got weaker and by the time I was 12, I was confined.

I’m only at peace with myself when I’m still and alone. Then I can write. I write about being the star on the track team, the best guitarist next to Jimi Hendrix, or falling hopelessly in love with someone who loves me more. But I never finish my stories. I don’t believe in happy endings and I don’t have the heart to end the stories with cruelty, so I quit before I get to the end.

One day, a typical afterschool afternoon, I was being wheeled to my car for pick-up. A picture in the hall caught my eye, so I asked to look a little closer, for a minute to myself. After intently reading an article posted next to the picture, I found out that a former student was on the track team, but with a catch. This boy was an amputee. But this boy won. He had two prosthetic legs and still managed to come in first place in every meet. From that day on, he was my inspiration, but still to this day I don’t see the point in having one.

Some days I am in tears. I want a cure, a cure for my undiagnosed disease. On the inside, I’m just an average boy who hates the stares that I get, but on the outside I’m a big-headed, small-boned, four-eyed freak.

School is dreadful and has been for the past nine years. I don’t fail because it’s difficult; I fail because I don’t care. Up until middle school I cared and I did my work, but I won’t make it in the real world so I won’t waste my time trying any more.

Is it over for me – or is this just another unfinished story?