Personal Narrative Essay : The Worst Summer Ever

“I sat down next to my brother, Dan, on the couch and got on my laptop. He started to look at my laptop and asked what I was doing with a smirk on his face. It was obvious that he knew what I was doing so I ignored him. My homework was to type a 5 paragraph essay on what we did over the summer. As I began to write, my laptop started to glitch. It kept happening over and over as I continued to type.

I walked away feeling like I was a complete failure and that I didn’t deserve to go on. On the way home my mother tried to talk to me, but, I put on my headphones and cried silently. Once we were home my father asked how it went. The tears that were in my eyes and they became more evident as my shoulders and chest were shaking and trembling. The only sound in the room was the sound of me crying and wailing. I started crumbling and falling to the ground and my mother and father rushed to my side. They held me until the tears came to a stop and a little bit afterwards

What I did this summer. That`s a good question to be honest, I did a lot of things that were considered fun for me, like shopping, hanging out with my family, hanging out with my friends, going to the beach, the water park and much more. But I will only break it down to two or three of my favorite things I did this Summer, so stick around to see what my favorite things about this Summer were.

Summer of 1994. New York City smelled no different than hot rat piss and looked accordingly. Fresh off my 15th birthday and wandering the Brooklyn streets with Hakeem, we followed the music wherever it played. Our community cherished music through constant airplay. Anyone with loud speakers, either in their car, apartment, or boombox, blared any of the anthems from the future greats. Whether it's Nas, Wu-Tang, Biggie, or Tribe, the list is blissfully endless. Hakeem’s brother, a well-connected music promoter, gave Hakeem two tickets to this secret show he was putting on for Ice Cube, who, despite being the first notable west coast rapper, carries a rage within him that the east coast entirely recognizes.

When I told her that your mother died, she cried. She remembered the time we visited your parents and you. Your dad caught a gaggle of fish and your mom deboned and fried them. That was her favorite memory of Michigan.

I sat on my bed with my arms wrapped tightly around my pillow swaying back and forth. My mom lightly knocked on my door and asked if she could come in. I tried to wipe away the stains left by my long stream of tears, but I felt my skin sting and eyes swell instead. She asked if I wanted to talk about it, but my response got stuck in my throat, so all I could do was shake my head and shove my head deep inside my pillow. Her bare feet smacked on the concrete as she made her way over to my bed. Her weight made an indent in the corner of my mattress as she sat down and laid a hand on my back.

All of my past summers have always followed the same path, but this year summer took a different path. This summer was more about surviving than having fun. They have always been about spending time with friends, sleeping, and just relaxing. When you are a kid that is what summer is all about, but as you get older it changes. This summer I had to juggle more than just friends and fun. I had to juggle work, practice, training, and just trying to hang with my friends.

Later that day it was twenty four minutes past three and time to go home. I packed my stuff and went straight to the bus. When I got on the bus everyone was looking at me weird. Nobody would sit with me. When I got home I went straight to my room and did my homework. Later my mom decided to come in and talk to me. I said I was sorry that I got angry for no reason, she said it was okay. Then we had dinner.

I even asked my mom and she said she would love to have you come, unless…” Her end of the line suddenly went quiet, which irritated me because she was dragging this out longer than it had to be.

My sophomore summer was ok I really didn’t do many things besides play baseball and mow hay. To begin with I was really excited for baseball to start because it’s my favorite sport, but by the end of summer I was ready for it to be over. Mostly because I started playing baseball in the middle of March and didn’t get over until the end of July.

We’re only several days away from 2017 and I’m sure we can all agree that 2016 was a really, almost unbearably, long and turbulent year for many of us. We’ve been graced with everything ranging from people becoming dogs on Snapchat to Vine being shutdown and lets not forget McDonalds introduced a 24-hours breakfast menu. Although 2016 was the worst we’re going to recap on all the good and bad things this year has given us incase you forgot.

With summer almost over, I can't help but look back on the past few months. Mid-May I was completely blindfolded, I dived into the summer months without any goals or any idea of what it would bring.

She said she needed to talk to my dad about something and that i should go inside for now. I knew something was wrong but at that time it didn’t add up to be this scenario. I watched it through the blurry kitchen window like a movie scene, my mom broke the news to my father and the tears streamed down his face. I automatically knew what was happening and to this day i don't remember how but i guess i had put the clues together before my father had or he cared for my mother more than she thought he had. After a while my father opened the door and said that my mother had something to tell me, i began sobbing and he kept asking “why are you crying? Cheyanna what are you crying for?” He hadn’t yet known that i knew what was happening and i didn’t want to accept the truth. We walked outside into what should’ve been a perfect summer day with the blue sky peeking through the trees as the wind rustled the leaves. My mother told me she was leaving my dad, she gave me no reason and i don’t recall her even crying or showing sympathy for

I used to think biographical criticism was false. I use to believe it was wrong to look into the authors like an try to connect the bits and pieces together, to assume their writing was a reflection to their lives, almost like a mirror. When I decided to turn against what i thought and look into how they might connect i made a discovery. Not only do the characters in the story connect to the author’s life, but even objects or buildings can serve a huge purpose. When i read the book One Crazy Summer by Rita Williams Garcia this summer i didn’t see the book for anything more than a great story with a powerful lesson. But after i read some of Rita’s biography i saw that she based some of her characters and situations from the book. For instance according to the biography of Rita Williams Garcia by Rutgers students; Susan Pais, Phyllis Brown, and Ann Gartner it states “My mother, Mrs. Essie, is perhaps the grand figure in my life, mainly because she frightened me, made me laugh, and loved to paint things in weird colors-napalm orange, chartreuse and aqua.

I remember it like it was yesterday, maybe because it was yesterday. No, I’m just kidding. It was more like this summer. Not this coming summer but the last summer. And not the summer of the year 2016, but the one from this year, 2017.