With Love, Guinevere (part two)

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Before I go forward, I am afraid that I must go back. You should understand my past so that you understand my future. I lived in Florida for the first fourteen years of my life; and for a very good reason at that. When my parents moved us to the middle of Texas, that reason became crystal clear even when my mother claimed (only in front of others) that she had left because of her physically abusive second husband (which is only half true).2

As my aunt took the liberty of reminding me at least once a week, my mom had planned to be a surrogate mother for her before my mom's doctor told her she couldn't get pregnant again. Stupid doctors. If that had been true, I wouldn't even exist. My aunt accepted that and they went on with their life. Well, to make a long, drawn-out, six-hour story short, mom got pregnant with me and my delusional excuse for an aunt claims my mother slept with my aunt's ex-husband. Yeah, right, like anyone would touch that. But that did nothing but lay claim in her delusional mind that I'm her daughter. As if I wouldn't run away from the lunatic, the first chance I got. Any child of hers would need serious counseling.3

In any case, she got sick and that's why my mom decided to drag us back to a state that we (my brother and I) don't even like. I lost so many of my greatest friends because, since we moved during the summer, I had none of their addresses except for Winter, who lived down the street. She was like the sister I never had and we shared EVERYTHING. Losing her was like losing my right hand. But we got through it and to this day, we're still very close. She gave me a reason to live when I had tried so hard to die.4

Writing got me through the first couple of months when I had no one to talk to and no one to have lunch with when I was feeling low (which was often, sadly). It's almost funny what these people bonded over. Like the band. My freshman year, we all bonded over moving into our brand-new, very own band hall. Being a fairly new school, the band had been floating around until the new building had been built. Band was where I first met Liam, through Julianna. He was so like my brother that it had scared me at first because my brother had put me through so much hell. But it was like a moth to flame, I just couldn't resist. In any case, he kept pestering me until I would talk to him. Julianna kept telling me to leave him alone and demanding that Liam stay away from me, but had eventually resigned to impossibility. I could no longer avoid him without great cost to my heart. I liked to have him near me. He made me laugh, no matter how depressed I was.5

Classes were so pointless my freshman year and I don't remember half of them due to lack of caring. I had wanted to go back so bad that I quickly became depressed and unable to concentrate. I just half-did my homework and spoke... well, when spoken to. Carol and Tim were my first friends. Tim had taken SIMMS (a very pointless math course) with me and quickly made it his job to try and cheer me up. Carol I had met COMPLETELY by accident. We were in English and had the school done right by her and I, we would have never been in the same class. She had already passed English 1 and I should have been in Honors.6

Mrs. Day-Aleman, easily the best English teacher, was doing a project to help us get to know each other better. She asked us to find a partner. Well, Carol had been the only other white person there so we paired up out of default. After I got to know her better, I began to admire her. She had been diagnosed with epilepsy as a child. She endured seizures daily, enduring multiple seizures a day, even on tons of seizure-suppressing medications. I admired her for her strength. I don't think I could have been able to live for that long with so much pain, but my time for pain would come. And endure it, I must or I would not live to tell the tale.         7

Pain, I have been told many times, is not the end of everything. Liam himself would not let me help him ease muscle cramps because he said that the pain told him that he was still alive.8

*~What about heartache?9

Is that pain enough?~*10

With Love,11

Guinevere12