Personal Narrative: Guess Who

The sparks fly in the air, there are marshmallows in your hair, and you’re with your favorite people in the world. This is called the best place on earth, for me at least. I enjoy camping so very much, you meet new people, experience different things, make new memories, and have a blast. You also see new sights, smell some things, and always wake up to the birds singing and not the bustling streets of the city. Camping is my go to activity.

My life began in Manhattan, New York in January of the year 1977. I was born to a 21 year old Irish American mother, Catherine Cunningham, and a 60 year old Sicilian American father, Anthony Perniciaro. My parents came from very different backgrounds. My mother’s family was relatively wealthy and affluent. My father was born and raised in Brooklyn. His parents were extremely poor immigrants that were seriously affected by the Great Depression. My father was a bricklayer and an artist when he met my mother, who was just starting her life, being only a few years out of high school.

The sand is cold, the sky overcast, and the waves crash against the shore echoing harshly through my ears. I see clouds rolling overhead, I can smell the salt of the ocean, feel the texture of the sand, taste the electricity on the air and it all points to the coming storm. Is it real? Can anything be real when seen through someone else's eyes, felt through someone else's skin, tasted through someone else's tongue, Breathed through someone else's nose, heard through someone else's ears? This is what the world looked like to her, felt like to her, but what did it look like to me, feel to me? Was there ever a me or only this continually changing sculpture, patterns of a person and nothing more. I shivered as the cold air caressed the flesh I wore.

Everyone remembers a time in their lives when their mom came through and saved the day. Mine happened to happen at 1:30 AM on a Saturday morning. To fully understand the story I’ll give some background.

By the time I knew what I was getting myself into, it was already too late.

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

Hiro didn't attend school that day, emotionally and physically drained by the past few hours. The pattern repeated the in the two following days until the week had come to a close. One day of wallowing in grief was turning into a weekend affair. This was the kind of anniversary no one wanted to remember, but the squeezing pain of loss made itself known regardless.

It was a warm day in October… Thursday, October 8, 2015 to be exact. I woke up at precisely 6:45 am, just like every other school day. I went through my usual morning routine of eating breakfast and getting ready for the upcoming day. But today was different. It was football game-day.

That morning had begun just like any other, or so I believed. It was a cold winter morning, a school day, and I was 14 years old, getting up to get ready for school. It was while I went about my routine that I realized my parents were nowhere to be found. I was immediately concerned and searched the entire house for them before frantically running to our neighbors and beating on the door, desperate for an answer. When I managed to explain that my parents were gone he told me to come along in his car. Concerned, and fearing what was about to happen, I went with him, feeling even more frantic when I realized we had arrived at the hospital.

Unfortunately I won't be in class today I'm stuck in the hospital once again with an upper respiratory infection and the flu my throat closed up Saturday night so there keeping me the until Thursday to make sure I'm okay. But just to make sure today in class where going over Russia and China right? And I'm not sure because I don't have my paper was there something about extra credit?

I hugged Bruno, our bouncy boxer, goodbye as he headbutted me and doused my face with his sloppy, sandpaper tongue. Then I hugged Bruno’s sidekick, Edi, our just-as-bouncy Jack Russell Terrier. They didn’t know this would be the last moment we would be together for a long time.

I open my eyes. My head is buzzing, my eyelids feel as if they weigh a thousand pounds; every inch of my limp body aches with an unbearable pain. My surroundings are hectic; acrid fumes are filling the air and blue and red neon lights pierce my eyes. Unfamiliar faces gather around my body talking a million miles an hour, but I can hardly decipher what they’re saying. Someone kneels beside me and faintly whispers, “sometimes you have to go through Hell to get to heaven.” I shut my weary eyes, unaware that they would never open again.

“Move the light so it’s on my good side,” Mary snapped her gum, and glared at the technician, “You just can’t get good help these days, you know?”

My release was under the cover of night in the empty parking lot of an abandoned business. When my blindfold was taken off, I saw June’s car already waiting for me in the lot. As the men who released me climbed back into their van, the last one on board pointed an outstretched finger and said, “Twenty miles, east,” after that I was alone in the pitch black.

“Life isn’t all cupcakes and sprinkles’….this sentence stuck with me until now, it made me remember why I don’t see the world as I used to. My mother had told me this simple sentence when I was a 10-year old, the day my delusional 10-year old eyes were pried open to the awful truth. This day showed me that I was a really good baker, but also, it taught me a lesson. Life wasn’t fair, no matter what you do. That day I was awoken with extremely strong emotions. Happiness ran through my veins.