Look. I am not happy. tomorrow marks a year since I went looking for my friend rich, only to be told he was dead. This fact brought the emotion of that time back. I’m not happy. I’m sad, but this sadness is like an anger. Nothing on this poxy goddamn planet will bring rich,, Dave, foxy, or any other of my school friends back. I counted yesterday: there have been five. I no longer direct my anger at god, for, ironically if he exists at all it means maybe they’re still about. To hunt god is to hunt the white whale – pointless and self destructive.

Rather, I point my bows at the special school system. The scheme which compacted us together, forcing us and those like me to watch as classmate after classmate, friend after friend, wilted and died. Such schools I truly hate; they are concentration camps, day care centres. If inclusion was in place, I know my friends would still have died, but maybe the grief would be spread thinner, shared more evenly, making the burden lighter. Maybe others would have seen, learned from my friends. Instead they were tucked away at school, away from the mainstream. I’m proud to have known them, and remember them with fondness, but they didn’t deserve to be shut away from their able-bodied peers, to die knowing only what it is like to be segregated, to be different.

Thus I channel my hatred at such schools. I blame them, for I can blame nothing else. By extension, I blame CaMoron’s conservative party, who seek to maintain such schools, to build more and therefore to segregate more. This means that more kids will have to mourn their friends, to be taken en mass to funeral parlours; even after leaving school, this means that every time they wonder how their chums are doing, they risk being turned away with sadness, to the extent that they become afraid to go looking. At one stage last year it got to a point where I feared they all might have gone, as two have MD, and I don’t know about Mayer or Liam. I became afraid to look for them, fearing the worst, petrified that history would repeat itself.

Do you not see what special schools do? They force us to go through such things. I will not countenance a return to that system. Despite their bright walls, they are places I will forever associate with suffering, of horror. And if that dick CaMoron wants to halt the progress we’re making towards inclusion, and reinstitute segregation, then, by whatever means I can muster, I will make him regret it.