Have you ever felt like there was always a secret everyone else knew but you? Have you ever felt like…..like, when you walk down the halls at school, when you walk down the aisle of a grocery store, even when you’re at the movies, you feel like people are watching you, ridiculing you. Judging you, plotting on you, joking about you, laughing at you, telling secrets about you, conspiring about you, picking at your nerves. Personally, I always have to live with this day after day after day. My name is Sam Moriningman, and this is my story.


It all started back in the first grade, or at least that’s where I first noticed it. I was simply digging a hole. Digging a hole, seems innocent at first perception, right? Well, unfortunately, it wasn’t in the eyes of the staff. You see every day we went out to what they called “recess”, I dug deeper into this hole, deeper, deeper. In fact I dig so deep, I got to where it was close to a secret. Because I had gotten so close to the secret, they covered my hole with cement, never to be dug in again. I was told that I was crying for 17 minutes.

Things began to get stranger and stranger as years passed, people became more suspicious, and I in need of peace felt it was only necessary to keep searching for the secret. Nights when I was studying the insides of my eyelids I pictured eons of space and how grand it would be to just know that damned secret! I was told I was going into middle school, bunch of cliques who want to be crews and goons who want to be leaders and leaders who want to be gods if you ask me. I hated them all, they knew I wanted the secret and didn’t dare speak of it to me, and because they knew I would ask, no one spoke to me at all. Everyday during lunch I would hastily eat and run back out to the court yard where I thought out my schematics, and then in the middle of my research the question arose, If God made us all, who made God?

In the end of my research, this was around my sophomore year in high school, I had finally decided that God wasn’t real and the secret was either in the main office or still in that elementary schools playground. Justice would soon be served, or so I assumed.

About midway into the school year, I decided to break into the main office and snoop around for the secret. When I had gotten there from a long walk home, I noticed an SUV parked outside of school, the keeper of the secret. I made my way into the main office via the backdoor with a blowtorch, stolen from my fathers toolbox. I then slipped into the backroom, where I spotted a desk with 4 drawers. I tried the first, there was a picture of a man wearing nothing. The second, cell phones, music players, and things of the sort. The third, empty. Suddenly, as I reached for the fourth, a tall dark colored man burst into the door and told me to freeze. He didn’t threaten me, for he was overweight and looked as if he had not the ability to run. I opened the fourth drawer only to be disappointed by emptiness, and he charged after me at a speed even I, being 105 pounds could not have reached. In shock, I couldn’t run and charged at me, and I dodged him. He ran into the wall and I almost laughed at him, but he still wanted to fight. He then came at me again as if we were boxing, which is when I began punching him continuously until he decided enough was enough and tackled me into to the desk which shattered under the pressure of our combined weight. We then got back up, this time he felt victorious so I punched his face as if I were aiming to knock him out, but this only made him smile and tackle me again. Instead of getting up, he began pounding my chest like an angry ape with his unimaginable large fist, thus knocking the wind out of me like a limp balloon. As I lay in pain, I heard sirens in the distance. They then came in and listened to the fat man tell his side of the story, even though they didn’t care for mine because I didn’t know the secret. As they asked for my side of the story, I could not tell them because I couldn’t move my face enough without falling out. I then found myself n the back of a police car, sirens wailing like the cry of a newborn child.

At the police station, I was in a holding cell by myself. When the police officer walked into my holding cell and said, “The detective will see you know,” I felt as if I was going to be spoken to and let go, but I was rather tormented by random headache-causing questions and repetitive accusations of drug abuse and some B.S. about the secret never existing, and that they didn’t know what I was talking about, but they all knew, I know they did.

Three weeks later I was sent to what they liked to call a mental clinic. I couldn’t believe my ears when I received the news that I, Samuel Moriningman is and always have been a schizophrenic citizen! This was madness! Nothing but a worthless excuse so that they can throw me in a white room with a straining jacket on so that I could rot like a dead or dying animal! I wouldn’t stand for it, not for one minute! However there was nothing I could do and I in need of peace can never know the secret, not as long as I would have to stay here.

I am dying, here in my bed with nothing to do but watch colors of things slightly fade away, slipping grasp was forever lost from my closeness to the secret, tears tumbled in and out of my wrinkles leaving a trail of wetness of my face. Life soon became a myth, I strained for my last breath, and then I finally realized what the secret was. All this time I was searching for the fact that imagination is limitless, it can take you places you would’ve never imagined you had the ability and willingness to go and then finally your life is over. My heart was restless, my breath was lifeless, and my eyes closed. In my final second my face resembled that of a crying first grader on the playground digging a hole, only to find nothing.