This is a narrative I just recently wrote for my english class about .....I don't like the title and the ending is all cheese, but I'm simply out of idea. Care to review it for me and tell me what you think? =d
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Once upon a time, everyone hated me. So that may be a bit of an exaggeration, but not by much. I was a small town outcast, “The Weirdo,” the girl everyone knew by face but no one knew by name. They were good times! I got to be as outgoing as I wanted, as mean or quiet or hyper or creepy as I wanted and it was accepted as “normal” for me. Hell, it was expected! The Weirdo not being weird? Impossible! So then I had no choice but to be weird. Everyday I had to put on a show for my audience. Dressed even crazier, acted more dramatically, tried to top myself, do something new, something no one would expect.
Eventually I decided to move away. Leave behind my family and few friends, in a way die young in my career as the town outcast. Cut myself off while still in the prime of my career, and I'd be a legend! They would talk about me when I was gone. “Oh, remember that girl? She was the most interesting person I've ever met! This town is nothing without her. It's all so boring now that she's gone!” It'd be great. And then I'd go back to visit, three times weirder than before, a goddess of the odd. It was a good plan.
And at first it really was a good plan. It was hard leaving my mom and brothers, but I was on an adventure! It was a mission! The purpose of my life was to be as weird as possible, and this was my chance. Driving with my dad, leaving behind the middle of nowhere, filled with all the dead brown things I had grown up with. Dead brown things sticking out of the ground, dead brown things splattered on the road, those boring old people with their dead brown brains.....And on to my very own Oregonian heaven. All lush and green and rainy and warm, filled with interesting people and interesting places. And for two glorious, glorious weeks it was summer. It was summer, and it was music, it was concerts, parties, boys, camps, art, friends, fitting in and being loved. It was perfect. My perfect new life with my perfect new self and my perfect new family. Living with my dad and step mom was a dream. We were beautiful, decadent, intelligent, fun, the best there could be.
Until one day, somehow, my step mom decided it just wasn't the best. The best was somewhere else, someone else, and she knew she could find it.
I'm not mad at her for leaving. I get it. Sometimes you've got to be selfish. And sometimes you've got to be selfish in the worst way, in the way that hurts the most, because that's just how the big decisions in life work. Someone's always going to get hurt. And if it's best for yourself in the long run, that's that what you've got to do. I'm not mad at her for leaving. Sad, yes. Heartbroken, yes. But not mad, and not hopeless. She may be nine states away, partying all night like the glamorous, awesome, single woman she is, but she will always be there for me and I know that. She's still my mom and I'm still her daughter just as much as when she was still satisfied with living here and being married to my dad.
I was mad at him. My dad's a pretty emotional guy, see. Thoughtful, passionate, intelligent, artistic. It's great! Makes him a real interesting guy to live with. What's not great is when you've got two weeks until your step mom moves to Louisiana, he doesn't want you seeing her or talking to her alone, spits her name every time mentions her, makes that same bitter face when he says anything about her. I guess he was trying to make himself feel better by making her seem and feel worse. What I guess he didn't realize was that it was all hurting me just as much. I mean, come on man! My whole life has been flipped upside down, shattered over my head, and now you're going to go and make it all worse, shoving the metaphorical shards of my life into my already bloody and bruised arms? Thanks. Thanks a lot.
To make it simple, the first two and a half months of high school were the worst two and a half months of my life. The high school part was great, I loved it. I loved the socializing and the learning and the foreignness of it all, the foreignness of such a huge structure filled with so many people, many of which were more like me than I ever though possible. The grades weren't so great, however, which didn't help the whole messy situation that was me and my dad's relationship. Where he had always been the nice, cool parent, he was now the parent that made me dread the end of the school day, the three day weekends, the having to go and spend any amount of time in the same building as him.
Everything he did made me want to kill baby bunnies sniffing flowers. And when I say everything he did, I mean everything he did. From sitting on the couch, to tuning his guitar, to talking on the phone, to making dinner. And the worst part was that I didn't understand this new intense dislike for the man I had always looked up to. I didn't like it, and sure didn't want it. It hurt me as much as it hurt him, and I couldn't even talk to him about it. Open my mouth to talk about something he had done the night before and everything he had done since August would come gushing out like a wave of suffocating, overwhelming word-vomit.
It was less suffocating when I talked to Krystee, though. Being my godmother, the friend that could legitimately help me out in life, the one person who was somehow closer than any of my other friends but I could say more to than my parents....She helped me get through those first several weeks. She let my say what I needed to, but let me stop when I needed to. Sometimes my dad wouldn't let me stop when I needed to, made me keep talking, tried to make me let the word-vomit overwhelm and suffocate me, just because he was so desperate to hear me reach out to him. I don't think he exactly understood the word-vomit concept.
Krystee did, though, and so for that first month or so I went to her when I needed to get away, found refuge in her living room, finding safety from all the drama in my life under the covers of the futon mattress I slept on when I went to her house. Admittedly, my life started to get better. Not as good as before, but not as bad as I was used to by then. My life was okay when I had Krystee there to help me through it. But no one can be satisfied with their lives being just okay. Not their whole lives. Eventually that feeling of okay was all there was to my life, and I knew it wasn't enough. My dad must've noticed that my life was just okay, and that it could be better, too, since he made me start going to therapy.
I had done therapy before, around fourth or fifth grade, and I guess it helped me out since I hadn't gone in a good four years. I figured it couldn't hurt anything. So I went along with it. For the first couple sessions I hated it. It was just more word-vomit and crying in front of some stranger, a soft-spoken petite woman named Sarah. She was nice enough, but who wants to cry in front of a stranger, much less a soft-spoken petite one? I certainly didn't. It helped, though. Not the crying, but the therapy sessions themselves. In a few weeks I had learned so much about myself, gotten rid of so much ridiculous emotional baggage from the past months that my life was starting to feel good again.
My heart was made out of handfuls of lockets, each pendant having the emotions of something that had happened locked inside of it, and all the chains of all the lockets that were in my heart were tangled in such a huge mess I didn't know what was what anymore. Therapy, and Sarah, helped me untangle and unlock those lockets, making my mind about five times easier to understand and my life about three times easier to navigate. Things might not be better than they where before I moved, but the aren't worse than they were after I moved. I'm just thankful that I had people there for me- not just Krystee and Sarah, but other friends and family members, too, to help me and support me when I needed it. That's all I could really ask for, and all I really need to live a happy life. And that's exactly what I have today.
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