Memoir Part One

Warmth and cohesiveness, all bundled together in a perfectly isolated dome. Four Towns, first taste of the world. The grimy yet comforting feel of the gravel on your hands, not caring if your new jeans got ripped or dirtied. The horses ran free here, innocence was eternal, happiness was a constant cascading river with each of us a trout swimming with the current, not against it. The world was too massive for my naive self to comprehend, so I chose to only accept the joy. The soles of our shoes imprinted among that primordial soil on the playgrounds epitomized our genuine untethered aspirations of happiness. However, just as a pendulum swings, warmth must always give way to cold. The first snowflakes started to fall on August 1, 1999.

I accepted the sharp contrast of familiar to strange like a tree tries to resist a a team of lumberjacks. My resistance was futile, no amount of tears or begging would allow me to remain in my little bubble. Without the familiar environment that I always took for granted, I collapsed into a hole within myself. My world had been shrunk into a little snowglobe, and this strange new world that thrust upon me was suffocating. I had to return to square one, but this time I was doing it on my own. As I walked down the elongated hallways, my psyche pulsating with tension and fear, I wanted to cry out for acceptance. The ghosts of what I used to be were just that, memories. Youth had been melted into a bubbling concoction of innocence, laughter, and spirit, slowly evaporating by the day. It took two years until my pot simmered away, leaving a cloudy, unsure future.