Life Begins Read Online Free PDF Page A

kindergarten when I told you I loved you and you broke my
heart?" And yet I feel like it is hanging over my head and keeping
us from being closer. I wish he would think about us.
    ~~~
    Out of the bad comes the good. I treasure
every moment with Christine because it has led us to this moment in
our lives. I think that is what my father was trying to get me to
understand with the stories about the Jews.
    I came on a little too strong when I was a
kid. I knew of love from what I saw of my parents. Christine didn't
have that with her parents. The thing about playing a part is that
you need to other person to play opposite you in a way that
compliments your performance. If you don't, then you are working
against each other.
    As for that napkin, I have kept it all of
these years. I haven't kept it because it makes me remember when
she broke my heart. Right next to it in my little box is her
bracelet from when she had to go to the emergency room.
    A few months after she broke my heart, we were
playing house. She was climbing into the tree house. She slipped
and fell. She broke her arm and had to go to the emergency room.
Through it all, I was the one that she wanted to be with her. That
wouldn't be such a great feeling if my heart hadn't been broken
earlier.
    Although it is kind of stalkerish of me to
have kept her bracelet from the emergency room. I don’t think she
knows that I dug it out of the trash. I see what she says now about
me being pathetic. It’s a good thing that we are actually dating
each other now. She would probably dump me with some of the things
that are about to come out in this book.
    And that is how the rest of our relationship
was though out the rest of our childhood. We had ups and downs.
There were times when I knew that she liked me. There were times
she was playing hard to get. Through it all, she just made me hard.
What can I say? She finally grew up enough to learn that a hard man
is good to find.
     
     
    Autistics are known for their
obsessions and socially inappropriate behavior. In kindergarten, I
was sure of my love for Christine and wanted nothing more than to
be loved by her. We could debate the merits of loving somebody
regardless of how they feel about you and whether this is wise or
not.
    As a writer, I have never
understood love and have spent the majority of my career trying to
make sense of it. I have seen some people so desperate to be loved
that they will put up with a great deal of crap just to have that
relationship status. It is like people are socialized to think that
if they are single, there must be something defective about them.
It is better to be in any sort of relationship than to be in no
relationship at all. In the same way, it is almost better to get
knocked up or to knock up somebody than to not reproduce at all.
Regardless of the quality of the relationship or the person’s
parenting, society looks at getting married and having children as
social passages that every person must do. If you don’t do it, then
there must be something wrong with you.
    Looking back on my childhood, I
can tell you that the only sin I committed in kindergarten was that
I loved Christine before it was socially acceptable to do so. Being
autistic, I expressed what I was feeling. Being normal, Christine
rejected me out of a fear of what others might think of
her.
    You can trace the majority of the
issues between us in this book back to this event in kindergarten
and our different ways of understanding and expressing ourselves.
One current theory would like to suggest that autism should really
be called Extreme Male Brain Syndrome because it values logic and
reason over emotions.
    Now, I know there are some women
out there that will emotionally offended by the fact that I would
quote a male scientist suggesting that men are more logical and
reasonable than women. I will say this as nicely as an autistic
person can. Women think their illogical reasoning is perfectly
logical and are deeply offended if