Collapsed Personal Narrative

I have lived in only one location my entire life: Edwardsville, Illinois. A peripheral suburb of St. Louis, it stands as the rare oasis of people in a desert of corn, pinned in its own personal bubble. Due to this blend of time and isolation, I developed a natural familiarity with my hometown. But, throughout my childhood, I longed to break free from the confines of the bubble and venture outward. However, this changed last summer, as I walked through Richards Brickyard, our family heirloom, that my great-grandfather, Benjamin Richards, founded over 120 years ago. I felt these childlike sentiments slip away. The bubble that had surrounded me for so long began to vanish, and the picture that it had been obscuring was slowly revealed.

As the Frost Festival finally drew to a close, the excitement of the frost fae, both royal and non-royal, began to wane as the festivities and parties died down, and the frosty multicolored flags of the various frost fae Clans were taken down and folded neatly for storage until the next Festival. I’d been working as a Frost Guardian for over twelve hours protecting the princess of the Snowflake clan, and, even though I thought that I was going to be beyond exhausted and more than ready for bed, I still felt strangely wide awake and even a little buzzed with adrenaline, like I’d gotten energy from the remnants of the festivities that had happened around me and the fact that I was finally training in the real world as a Guardian.

I come across a rear projection TV on the side of the road one day, load it up, and take it home. I eagerly spend a good four hours stripping it down and saving as much as I can. I end up with a 48” fresnel lens, two hefty speakers, a couple large capacitors, three glass lenses, and a glass mirror. Left over is a box of electronic waste and the particle board skeleton of a TV. I take the electronics to my local electronics recycling center, and set the wooden frame on the curb. I took 70 lbs. of trash and turned it into 10 lbs. of treasure ripe for projects, 30 lbs. of recyclables that would have gone to a landfill, and 30 lbs. of refuse that I had fun

I have lost my grandpa and have not gotten over the idea of it. When I was in the sixth grade, my grandfather was very sick; he could barely walk. While my grandmother and some other family members went uptown for some household things, food, and medication, I was told to take care of him. Yet, I wanted to play with my friends outside. He told me to go ahead and play, but for some reason I just got mad and slammed the door and left. Around nighttime, I seen an ambulance pull up to my grandparents’ house.

It is true in life that everything happens for a reason. It is also true to say that sometimes it is all about being in the right place, at the right time. There was never a more prominent example of this than a traumatic summers evening, only a few years ago.

Tuesday, March 6th, 2018 at approximately 4:30 p.m., I Detective L. Donegain was contacted by Sergeant P. Orellano in-reference to a possible overdose at 415 Tradewinds Drive apartment B, Fayetteville, North Carolina 28304. I was advised Patrol Officers were on scene and standing by.

Baghdad, Iraq is where I was born and raised; I lived there for about 6 years during the most pivotal years of the war. My dad left when I was about 7 months. He went to Lebanon to live for a few years before settling in the United States. My mom took care of me and my siblings. War was going on in Iraq; people walked with a dying heart. Iraq was split into Shiite, Sunni, and Christianity. Sunni and Shiite do not have any issues with one another, but there are people who do not like the Shiites and caused civil strife between the two divisions of Islam. My family is Shiite and we do not believe in a separation between anyone because we are one, they are

I was ready. This was how we were going to start off the season. Everyone was ready, thinking this was it. We wanted to be the best team on the ice. The coaches came into the room saying, “Let’s go, boys. Let’s start the season off on fire . . . big win today!”

It was a cold day in November as I scampered out of my Biology class, unsatisfied with the grade that I had received on my exam. I rushed to the basement of my campus’s athletic facility brimming over with frustration and quickly tossed aside my school supplies in exchange for a pair of soccer cleats and goalkeeper gloves. I threw over my grass-stained gray cotton sweatshirt, stepped outside to the bite of an approaching winter and joined my comrades in our warm-up lines. The boys were all laughing and talking about what happened over the weekend as we prepared for another practice. Being surrounded by my teammates made me forget about my worries and allowed me to disappear into the routine of physical activity. My collegiate varsity soccer

Swish, tumble tumble, crash. I could just tell by the way I fell that something was wrong. Very wong. But I decided to just keep going even though it hurt. I was at the Jackson Hole ski mountain and was on the Rendezvous bowl with the Jackson Hole ski and snowboard team.

One of two. That's how I feel everyday of my life. I'm a twin and that means I will never be complete without my other half. When I was younger, I learned that having a twin does not keep me from things. It's getting to have a person in my life that I don't need to hide from, other than in hide and seek. When I was little, my brother probably hated me as much as I hated him. But we were together all the time. We went to school together, we were in the same class almost all the time. Sometimes, we had the same friends even. We shared birthday parties, cakes, presents, money. Basically the same things we still share now. But between us, we shared secrets. Little things that we thought were so cool. When my grandma gave us money, we split it and made sure not to tell our parents. I went and bought

I think about it for a moment. "Thanks for the offer babe, but I'd rather fly this one solo" I reply to him.

Take a deep breath, I told myself looking in the visor mirror, just breathe. I looked to my right and droplets of water covered the passenger side window of my fathers Jeep. Two of the droplets had streamed down the window and I admired the beauty of their disarrayed paths. I compared the droplets to the bittersweet chaos that has consumed my life. Their paths had no direct course and jerked left to right slowly and then in a rush as if there were a magnet below them.

One night I was riding in the car with my cousin to the store.While he’s driving to the store he was speeding down the road. While he was speeding down the road a deer jumped out into the road in front of the car. We tried to dodge the deer, but instead ended up hitting the deer and a ditch. We ended up flipping our whole car into the ditch with the deer. I somehow ended up in the back seat , because I was being stupid enough to ride with him and not wear a seatbelt. But anyways I went to the back seat and just broke his leg and hip. The wreck had my cousin unconscious, so I reached into my pocket and grabbed my phone to call my cousin’s mom. She quickly rushed to where we had the wreck. She pulled

There isn’t a day in my life that I wake up and do not ask myself, “Why?” Why did my mother have to leave? Why did this happen to me? Without a doubt, the absence of my mother is the hardest obstacle I have had to overcome. My parents were young and unsure how to raise a child on their own. My mom really believed she could not do it, so she left when I was eight months old. At that age, a mother to an infant is everything, yet she was not there. I grew up not knowing the love of a mother, but learned to be independent. I did not have someone to guide me through childhood because my dad was too busy working in order to provide for us, and his family had kids of their own to worry about. Though his family loved us, they favored their own children over me and my sister. We had to do everything around the house while they did nothing. We felt as if we had no voice and no one to support us. Being in this situation made me into