The Yarian Chronicles: Second Life

Prologue

I'd always known I was different. Everything was always...off. My life just didn't fit. I'd known it, from the first moment I could recall in the group home. I would sit in the corner all by myself, and draw pictures of wells and castles, constantly in a state of dreaming; an unconscious consciousness. As I grew up, and they'd place me in different foster situations, foster parents would complain of my weirdness. Social Services would tell them, I would grow out of it. It was normal for kids that came in like I did, a baby abandoned in a dumpster, to want to be by themselves, for at least a little while. I was lucky that someone had heard my cry as they passed by, and took me in.

Then one day when I was about five years old, these wonderful people took me in, and. It was love at first sight. They adopted me as soon as they were allowed. Now I call them Mom and Dad.

In elementary school I was the adopted kid who sat in the corner and watched everyone else play baseball and soccer during recess. Not so much because they didn't offer, which they didn't. But because there was just this knowledge between all of us kids, that with them was not where I belonged. It was a mutual understanding. Sometimes I wonder if children have a premonition about things like these. There was maybe one kid, every once in a while, who didn't quite clue in to this understanding, they would come over and ask me to play, I would politely refuse, and we'd all go on with our lives. I'm the kid who sat in the back of the class, flicking my pencil while dreaming of faraway places; that weird kid that no one quite understood or cared to understand. The kid that no one wanted to sit beside, yet no one made fun of.

Then one day, there was this one girl who really challenged me. She wouldn't give up until I came and begrudgingly joined a game of soccer on the large grassy school yard. Shortly after, she became my friend.

After that, I started to loosen up and push that weird and misplaced feeling into the back of my head. I learned to hide my differences. I stopped drawing, and making up stories of extoic places. As I grew up I created this persona on the outside, a mask I'd hide behind. While everyone seemed to accept it I knew in my gut, that I was still that weird girl that shouldn't be there. That things weren't quite right. Little did I know how right I was.