-Prologue/Author's Note-
"The world is a dark place." That's what my mother used to tell me when I was still too young to understand exactly what she meant. It wasn't hard to get what she was saying when I got older; but as a child, not paricularly knowing the difference between light and dark,--good and evil--it was a task just to hold onto her words. It was a task when all I wanted to do was play videos or go outside and frolic with my friends.
Friend. Such a misleading word. I always thought a friend was supposed to be a person attached to another by feelings of affection or personal regard. I didn't think friends were supposed to hurt you or betray your confidences; but I could have been wrong in what I learned. I mean, I experienced everything contrary to what I thought a "friend" was supposed to portray. I was called names. I was beat up. I was laughed at and shoved down by people I was supposed to consider my COMPANIONS; people who were supposed to be my support...who were supposed to love me.
But what is love, anyway? I mean, I know it's just like the emotions of a "friend." Feelings of affection. But love is different, isn't it? Love is something that is supposed to render you able to do anything for a person; walk a wire for them--DIE for them. And I never had anyone like that. My mother, perhaps; but it's an obligation for her to feel that way. I'm her child.
So, is it any surprise when my only friend wound up being a small, deep sky blue notebook that listened without talking back or making fun of my secrets? I started to write in it with pretty colored pens when I was nineteen. It helped me relieve the pain of being, somehow, alone in the world. But when I would lay those pink, purple, and blue pens to that paper, my aim wasn't to tell my life to a BOOK. I was writing to a person who I never expected to see the pages. Maybe I was crazy; but his name is Mike. He makes up one-sixth of a band called Linkin Park. I feel like an idiot telling you all of this; but they, Linkin Park, have been my security blanket since I was eighteen. They kept me safely in my room, listening to music and writing stories, rather than stepping up on a ledge and throwing myself off a building. The people around me, the ones that are actually happy I'm still here, should be thanking them; however, the only thing the band, unknowingly, gets are jibes from my "obsession" and cringes at their music.
So, I started to write in that book. I wanted to tell SOMEONE my feelings. It didn't matter that Mike would never lay hands or eyes on it, as long as I let myself vent somehow. After a time, though, I found myself wishing he could see what I had written in my messy scrawl. I wanted someone to know the pain I was enduring in the silence of my quaint little bedroom in Rochester, Indiana. I wanted to tell someone. So, I made myself a promise. I promised myself if I ever had a chance, even the slimmest, to give him that book, I would.
So, on August 17, 2008, when I walked backstage at the Projekt Revolution concert in Noblesville, Indiana, that tiny, turquoise book was hanging limply in my hands. And then I sat down at a table, and he sat next to me, and roughly ten minutes later, that book was in HIS hands, not mine. It was the first promise to myself I'd ever kept. On some level, that felt good; but on another, more tormenting level, I screamed at myself how wrong it had been. I'd just handed over my entire life to someone I didn't know. But...I had to tell someone.
So, this is a fiction about that book, requested passionately by the only real friend I have, the best friend I could have ever asked for: Clare, who I met, so mercifully, through the Linkin Park Underground in 2008.
Enjoy.