Greetings, dear reader. You are about to embark upon an extremely long and boring trek into an equally and possibly even longer and more boring life. This is not a story of fantasy, or adventure, or punching robot laser sharks into an active volcano on Mars. This is a simple story of a simple boy who found simple solace in simple scratches on paper. This is the story of the boy coming apart at the seams, breaking down, and slowly sewing himself back up, imperfect but alive. This is the story of that boy. This book will not be told, just like life, in a perfect sequential order of cause and effect with an established beginning or end. I cannot promise you a happy ending or a sad ending or any form on ending at all. All I can promise is that this story will be truthful, or as least as truthful as your author can bring himself to remember. So I humbly suggest you turn away now, dear reader. Go and read something worth reading. Browse through John Green’s vast array of books or skim through The Catcher in the Rye or test your endurance and read the god awful fan fiction that is My Immortal. But if you have continued to read past these next words, consider yourself fairly warned. For now starts the story of that boy. Now begins the story of me.
The young boy walks into the light,
Smile on his face and in his heart
Poor naïve soul
He does not yet know
The closer to the sun he gets
The longer his shadow becomes
The story begins in middle school, as everything before that would not be worth mentioning in the slightest. I cannot lie and say that I recall enough of that first day walking back into, but I do recall my emotions. Hopeful, nervous, anxious, all of this and more can be used, but I won’t bore you with useless jargon. Let it just be known and noted that I was a cocktail of hope and fear. I remember sitting in the class of my teacher, Ms. Stanton, a lovely lady with a big smile ever present on her face and a desire to teach in her eyes. I recall greeting my friends from the past year and new faces alike. I remember dreaming of all the things I’d accomplish through that year and how studious I’d be and how popular I’d be. I dreamt of being fantastic, and was dead set on achieving that goal.
Everything went downhill from there.
Now, by the last sentence, with its isolation from the paragraph on either side of it, you may assume it to be of acute importance to the further narrative, or to reveal something about me that is deep and will change my life forever, just as your Literature teacher has most definitely taught you at this point, and to that regard, I cannot blame you. But please try to understand, dear reader, that the previous sentence does not mean that I had a particularly bad 6th grade year. It was simply empty. The friends that I believed to have been so close to me, the Marlin Rodriguez’s and the Daniel Reyes’ and the Alex Alonso’s, had all moved away, either physically or emotionally, moved into new cities or new groups or new friends. And I was left alone. The 5 foot 8 inch tall giant with wispy peach fuzz on his lips, who had been sheltered all his life from the outside world, now had not a notion of how to discuss anything with his new friends with new adult words and new adult ideas. I fell silent. I escaped into reading instead of talking and lost any “true” friends I had. I passed from day to day and month to month absorbing any literary piece I could get my hands on. Shakespeare, Orwell, Dickens, no author could escape the ravenous maw of my desire to fill in the silence that fell upon me. I suppose I succeeded in that regard, becoming the intellectual giant of the class. Or at least I would have if I had had the courage to raise my hand nearly as much as I had the years before. But I digress. It would be anticlimactic to spend the next 238 words simply on my 6th grade experience, especially considering there are still 5 more grades to cover and an infinite amount of subplots. As I said before reader, you were warned.
