It's Memorial Day today and I thought I'd commemorate this special day with a moment of silence........................................................................................and the beginning to a three-part series from a good friend of mine named Nick. We've known each other since....well, I can't really remember when lol
This series is a synopsis of his life, without any added details. That is, except for the names of some of the people he mentions of course. :P Some of the things he has told me about his life are extraordinary and I wish he could have went more in-depth when I asked him to write a piece for Life in Fiction, but I think that his story will still convey the message he's looking for.
Anyways, I will be posting each part a week apart, meaning next Monday and the following Monday, because who doesn't love a "to be continued..." sign after each episode ;)
Enjoy!!
Forever and a half ago I began my life, and everything was perfect. I was a young boy living in Los Angeles with his nuclear family. My parents fought a little, but I found ways around it….my sister and I found ways around it. We would hide whenever they would start to fight and delve ourselves into the lie that everything could be fixed as long as we had each other.
I was eight years old when my parents finally divorced. That point in my life was the start of my problems. In dealing with my parents’ divorce, my mind began to send me into “mental break-downs,” brought on by the smallest of problems. I was unable to control my emotions, but I still had my sister, my best friend.
Then, my dad moved to Michigan to be with his girlfriend and my mom sought the help of one of her friends to help pay the rent for our apartment. Needless to say, my mom’s plan didn’t work, and all three of us were left homeless and on the streets. Gathering together the scraps of our lives, we rented a cheap motel room and attempted to plan for the future. In the end, my sister and mom moved to Las Vegas to live with relatives and I was sent to Michigan to live with my dad. The plane ride to the Midwest was the first time in my life I had ever felt loneliness.
My dad’s girlfriend was nice enough when I first met her, but her son was the spawn of Satan—I’m being quite literal. The child was racist—which didn’t work with the fact of the multiracial status of my dad and I—and he had all of the characteristics of someone who would later grow up to be a serial killer. His name was David.
That first year in Michigan I gained a significant amount of weight out of stress and a change of diet, I met the first fake friends I had ever acquired, and I felt a slight sense of isolation in the back of my mind. However, I tried ignored the negatives and tried to progress with my new life with my dad as the only family I had. Unfortunately for me, the negatives caught up with me, and I witnessed my first act of racism poised against my dad and myself courtesy of his girlfriend’s family. After that, I no longer felt wanted where I was, but I stayed with my dad regardless because I felt that he was the only one I could trust. The following five years were much of the same bullshit. Elementary school ended, leaving me friendless. At the start of middle school I had new hopes that were crushed by my growing hatred for my time in Junior high school.
In 7th grade, my sister came from Las Vegas to live with us. At first, I was glad to have my friend back, the one person I could count on no matter what. Soon, however, I realized that time had changed her and she was no longer my companion from the happy days of my childhood. When we’d come home to school we would get into fights over the smallest of things (television, music volume, etc.). I realize that brothers and sisters are supposed to fight, but each verbal fight would turn physical and would transgress into something more violent. For example, there was one time when I had turned the channel to WB after school in order to watch Pokémon. My sister did not want to watch the show and began to change the channel on me, this action turned into a loud argument, which escalated to her grabbing a carver’s out of the kitchen and chasing me out of the house in the middle of winter. I walked down to the end of my ¼ mile driveway and stood at its end for a half hour before she came down to apologize. This violence was frequent. Similar incidents happened daily and eventually I grew tired of her assaults and began to pin her and fight back, at which time she would threaten to call the cops on me. For two years this happened unbeknownst to my dad, until my sister finally decided to move back to Nevada. Going into my freshman year of high school, I adopted a non-violence policy and refused to resort to violence in any fashion. Very few times did such a policy hinder me in any way.
During my freshman year was when life began to change for me. I was beginning to gain control over my emotions and had wiped away all traces of the mental breakdowns I had suffered from for so long. I became active in my school’s marching band, where I met people of varying significance who never actually contributed to my life as more than acquaintances…but I digress. I began to write in 9th grade. Originally I created small sayings, like I used to see in fortune cookies (yeah, funny, right?), then I began to expand on the sayings and began to write poetry, my first real outlet for my emotions.
to be continued...
So, how did you like it?
Post any comments you want to make and remember to keep sending us anything that you want to see posted on our blog.
Anyways, life's waiting for me so I better end this post :P
~Alex
