My name is Lyna Costa. I live in the baby blue Victorian two kilometres away from Martin Van Buren High School. Yes, I’m that girl. Also, as of yesterday, March 20th, I’m sixteen. You know that post-birthday feeling you get when you’re at your locker – decorated with colourful wallpaper, black and white pictures of you at your craziest moments and random signatures here and there – and some stranger waves at you and wishes you happy birthday so enthusiastically you’d think you were best friends? Well, I hated that feeling, and those people. I hated people who walked around thinking everything was perfectly okay, smiling like there was no tomorrow, pouncing at the chance to be nice to someone even if it meant their embarrassment. I hated them because until just a short while ago, I was one of them.
Maybe, if I’d seen the girl with the smile that stretched to her eyes a year ago, I would’ve smiled right back, and said sincere thanks, appreciating her gesture. But not today, not anymore. All I felt when she passed by me was loathing, maybe even jealousy, of someone who can smile without worrying about the consequences. Because I, Lyna Costa, had nothing but consequences to worry about.
But that’s not why I write – not why I try to get everything I’ve ever experienced or known of down on paper. I don’t write to complain. I write to remember, because – I usually don’t tell people this – I’m afraid of forgetting, of losing my life’s memories, but mostly because I can’t live my life knowing that nobody will know who I was and what I’ve been through, ever.
