Personal Narrative

I arrived at practice with my shoes laced, hair pulled back, and the mindset that I was unstoppable. I could play against every member of my team and come out the victor on any given day. It was the first day of practice that week, and challenge matches were scheduled to begin. The team went through our daily shuffle of drills, conditioning, and running to prepare for what was lying ahead. While warming up with my friends, I felt great, talking about homecoming, boys, and a variety of irrelevant events. I felt ready. The odds were in my favor and nobody could stop me.

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

I felt the tears push against my eyelids, threatening to spill onto my cheeks. The deep breaths that were supposed to calm me down were not working in the slightest and I wanted nothing more than to hide under something, anything, and avoid all responsibility for a while. Through blurred vision, I could barely make out the shocked faces of my friends. This was not supposed to happen here, in the middle of physics class. This was the kind of thing that a person should save for being safely hidden behind closed doors. I glanced down at the four little words on my phone and lost it. The floodgates opened. Hot tears turned my face into a network of rivers and lakes. The saltwater filled the dark bags under my eyes and turned them into oceans. Rivulets

For a while, I had been running away from the terrifying incidents. All I saw were men with big guns and people shooting. Everyone had a curfew. No one got out of the house after dusk. Life wasn’t the same, school wasn’t the same. My routines weren’t the same.

In San Francisco, about a year after my mother died, when I was nine or ten years old and going to the second new school since moving in with my father, I had a desperate crush on a girl named Lisa. She was a year older than me, in the next grade level up (our classrooms were combined). She was pretty, Asian, was popular with a group of friends that would surround her during recesses.

It had been around 42 days. I had no way to know when the sun was rising or setting; I only had my sense of time. They came in every day and gave me a small loaf of bread, some sort of meat, and only enough water to wash down my food. It was not enough to give me strength only enough to keep me alive. I was not sure where I was or even how I got there. The only thing I knew was that I wished I could go back home to my loving family.

My day starts out like most of a dollar’s day starts. As I rest in my owners wallet. He grabs his wallet and slides it in his back right-hand pocket, with me included. This is how my journey begins.

G sharp, C sharp, E natural. Finger 5, 1, 2, and 5 again. And then F sharp, and then…yes, I finally got it! I think to myself as I do a fist pump into the air. I had perfected a part of a piece I was playing that I had been struggling with for the longest time. My left hand was already tired from hammering away at the piano keys for what seemed like hours. I turned the pages back to the beginning of the song and played through the whole song. I was finally ready perform it at the recital.

Well, I can’t say that I am not scared. I mean…I am kind of standing beside my shed looking for someone. Let’s see, what can I do to get this off my mind for a few minutes? I am not really thinking straight right now, but I will keep thinking. Suddenly I hear a twig snap, and just like any “ brave” boy would, I go and investigate. I turn my flashlight on to get a better view of the tree rubble. I don’t see anything so I turn to leave and come face to face with a masked man. Out of nowhere he pushes me to the ground and sprints off. When I look around, I see that the ground is littered with broken glass, but I think nothing of it. For some reason when I stand up I feel a whole lot shorter and surprisingly itchy. I do one quick glance

I attempted to draw air into my lungs but my throat was too tightly shut by the force of the sash wrapped around my neck. Neither would sound come out, nor air stream in. From afar, I could hear laughter and conversations going on in the near rooms. Louder in my head were muffled noises coming from my nasal passage in its final attempt to breathe in its last breath. Life and death, in this very moment, were all under one roof. My hands, still in my pockets, involuntarily clenched into a fist. My toes cleaved to one another as if to say to each other “We are in this together.” They curved in towards my heel and would have fain clenched into their own fists’. This pendulum of a girl and noose no longer oscillated. Time had stopped. The initial

"Oh? How bad you've been? You've been so bad you need to be punished? You've been so bad you need to be spanked?

When I was in kindergarten, my mom who had just broke up with Wane A.K.A. the worst person on Earth, met my soon to be step-dad, Chris. They dated for a little bit, about three years or so. Chris was awesome, he would play super-heroes with me, and even let me jump on the couch. Then, one day, mom and Chris announced to both his family, my mom’s family and me, that they are going to get married. A year after the announcement we went on Royal Caribbean’s “Oasis of the Seas”, which was so big, it felt like being on the Titanic. We had a wedding on water, the taste of sea salt made me think of making cookies with my grandma. The day after the wedding I almost chopped my big toe off trying to stop the elevator door from closing. The doors felt like two razor blades

A few hours and two trips back to the refrigerator later, John found himself staring at the clock on the wall, attempting to decipher the time. It had to have been well into the evening by now, and he surely was supposed to be home hours ago but Alexander Hamilton had a way of making you forget things like that. He had just done a rendition of a Christmas song that John could not recall moments before and had stumbled through the lyrics to the tune of John’s laughter. At the final chord, Alex had taken it upon himself to dramatically drape his body across John’s legs and pushed as close as he could manage into his chest. John giggled at this before absentmindedly running his fingers through his hair.

I am writing this letter because when you would not talk to me on the phone I realized how drastically things have changed between us. I’d like to say that it was your decision alone to keep this distance, but I think we both know it was for the best.

After all movement stopped but the trembling of my clammy hands and chilly legs, I knew more than one impact had just occurred.