Personal Narrative: Personal Experience

It's a Friday afternoon, I plan to go to Great Wolf Lodge in an hour with my church. I see one of my friends so he says to his mom “ Hey, that's my friend” I said “Crap” So I go inside to sign in to go and see my friends just sitting in a corner on a big sofa. We are listening to music and just talking then a green bus comes.

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.

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.

Put the gun down! Put the gun down! Pow Pow Pow. The gun shots cracked into the air as loud as thunder. One after another. We live day by day not knowing our end. In the blink of an eye our lives can be changed forever. Its life, yet even in knowing this we never expect tragedy to find us. We never expect it to affect our lives and the people we know and love. I’m going to share with you the day tragedy found my life.

That was a lot of money, and I didnt want to let Tony down so I got in the car and started to drive. As I drove the road was empty. I had confidence I was not going o get caught. It was a slightly wormer day out witch might have been because the sun was out. I had the windows down and was blaring music just trying to enjoy life when a cop pulls out behind me.

She thought I was really weird, well she still thinks I’m weird but that is beside the point. At first we spoke two different languages and shared completely different customs. Being the new kid from another country, my conversations with her were tended to be short and awkward and we never had much to talk about. I would laugh when she and her friends laughed, even if I didn’t understand the joke at all. I tried using slang as often as I could, even though I wasn’t sure what any of it meant. However, after an entire year of frustration and self-motivation, I was finally making progress. I picked up some more English and learned a lot about American culture and customs. Then I became even more engaged, I joined the school tennis team and even became the only Chinese cheerleader in our school. Slowly, I found out that Daniela and I share a lot in common: we both love reading, eating healthy and working out. Nowadays she helps me enhance my English and I help her learn how to be more

Around this time she developed a love for playing with toy dinosaurs and dragons. She also met her best friend Cookie in third or fourth grade. She also developed a love for art, although it wasn't much more than scribbles at the time. Sarah also got her first handheld gaming system when she was young. It was a Gameboy and it came with her first Mario game. Sarah never really had a best friend and didn't really know how to act around Cookie. Sarah always shared her toys with Cookie and always invited her to her house as much as possible. Which in turn made Sarah look pretty needy and smothering. Cookie was a very sociable little girl and had many friends which made it difficult for Sarah.  She always tried to keep Cookie looking her way instead of everyone else's because she wanted to spend as much time with her as she could.  She started to have a hard time making friends at about the middle of elementary school. Sarah was starting to become too dependent on Cookie and Sarah thought she was ok with that. She had always had cookie as a friend, although it was a difficult friendship to keep because cookie constantly lost interest. Sarah went to middle school with

SJ and I were polar opposites. Two young girls forced into an unforgiving world and left to sink or swim. SJ's life lived on a tight rope balanced between the sweet devout Christian girl who loved her family and the sexually promiscuos girl who experimented with drugs and sneaking out to meet up with the boy toy of the week. Her two parent, two story home protected her for only so long as she stepped off her tight rope and went head first into a world that she never was supposed to belong to, the world that I belonged in. I met SJ in my third high school in as many years. That day she left her two story home to come to my one-half parent, two bedroom apartment.

I met her in the most difficult part of my life. Last year, I started the journey abroad from a tiny town, full of exceptions. I was fantasying how my new life will be like during the flight----Fresh air and better living conditions, lots of new friends from various countries, funny school activities... All of these beautiful imagines disappeared like the froth under the sunshine when I truly started my new school life. Making a friend was not as easy as I thought before, moreover in an unfamiliar environment. I was lonely and got no friends, even Chinese. I always left school very early and locked myself in my bedroom. Phones and computers were the only things I could chat to.

I can distinctly remember the moment when I realized Sarah was not like other girls. One day during third grade, I was talking with my neighbor's little sister at the bus stop. She was younger than Sarah, and she amazed me with how well she spoke. She made jokes and understood what others asked her, whereas Sarah did not understand new questions or humor. In that instant, I began to feel ashamed, wondering why my sister didn't seem as smart as other children.

She soon moved to my school and once that happened we were inseparable. I'd look out for her and she'd do the same for

The training ground was outside and depending on what we needed it for was able to instantly change its terrain. I walked over to a nearby basket and pulled out an old wooden bow and a quiver full of arrows.

When I was younger, my uncles to joke about the fact that I was americanized; that I didn’t know how life really was back in the motherland. I would just laugh and tell them to leave me alone. Then, I saw what they meant when we went to Africa in 2009.

A horrendous thing that happened to me was the time when I broke my foot. The positive side of that is that I learned my lesson. I was at my grandparents house about 3 years ago, and my little cousins and I were playing tag. I then leaped off 2 steps and landed on the rocks that were a few feet from the stairs. My foot started hurting horribly and my parents came to check on me. I limped all the way to the couch and had to put ice on it. We then left and I went straight home my parents did not think that it was broken or sprained. For the next 3 weeks I had went and was running and jumping on it my foot hurt continuously, especially when I had to run the 3 miles. So finally, my parents brought me to the hospital and the doctors gave me an

Sarah started being my best friend after the first the months of being official till then end of our relationship. We use to literally spend every ounce of free time talking on the phone or hanging out. Looking back me many might think I had invested too much time. However I do not think even an ounce of time was wasted spending Sarah. Through the good times and the bad it was all still very much worth