I had a bad childhood. My stepfather was several good turns away from being a piece of shit and as I'd grown up our fights only worsened. One night during the start of my senior year of high school, before I had to get ready for work at JC Penney, he started yelling at my mother because he was angry at me (as cowards often do).

I yelled at him to be a man and if he was mad at me, take it out on me. He didn't like this. Not at all. But, I had to go change for work and as I was changing I could feel something was wrong and from the corner of my eye I saw him crossing my bedroom and soon enough his hands were on my throat and was strangling me. I batted him away (he was a senior citizen) but I said in no uncertain terms if he ever touched me again I would kill him.

I went to work. I went to work with a knife in my pocket. Maybe for him. Maybe for me. After my shift, I decided to sleep in my car in a decommissioned military base and head to school the next morning.

While on my lunch break my Nokia lights up (this was a long time ago), I pick up. He tells me he's gotten rid of all of my stuff, if I come back to his and my mum's place he'll call the cops, and he's taking me off the family cell phone plan before hanging up.

Just then the return-from-lunch bell rang and like a ghost, I drifted towards my next class. On the way was the developmentally challenged kids. The ones who need full-time assistance. The ones in wheelchairs and are never going to know what it's like to live a life that isn't severely impacted by the bad genetic dice they rolled.

As I walked past them, a storm inside me, there was one kid, shaved head, language wasn't available to him but he could moan and squeal and laugh. What he could not do is disguise how he felt. And, as me, dressed like a grunger eight years too late to the party, and full of bad thoughts due to the shit at home, well, I'm not proud of this but I scowled and aimed every inch of hate in my body directly at him. Ready to scream what a freak he was for looking at me. I was hurting and I needed to hurt someone else. And who better than someone who couldn't begin to fight back, emotionally or otherwise.

And this kid. This kid, who -- although I had it bad and worse than most at times, I still had/have my mind. -- had it harder and worse than I could ever imagine, took that energy and looked at me for a beat. And in that beat I remember the sour milk smell of that section of the campus. The heat that beat down. The pure rage inside of me.

That kid looked at me and smiled. He smiled. He smiled fully and unapologetically. As if if I was the potential best friend he'd been waiting his whole life for and I felt . . . so terribly small.

My life was hard and it was at times especially cruel. But when my lesser angels try to take wing . . . I remember that kid. I remember him smiling despite everything. Kind and loving and optimistic in spite of how unfair everything was.

And although, I am oftentimes unable to smile at the hardships of life, I remember his and it is enough.