Looking Back

A Story by anneliese

a english assignment on how event in our past have shaped who we are today

Looking Back

Although my name identifies me as me, it does not identify who I am. Sometimes I find my

name too boring, to simple to hold this wild personality, the crazy teenager I am with my

friends. And other times it seems to fit perfectly, encompassing the nobody that I feel I am,

telling the world I’m unoriginal and unnoticeable. These moments I’ve learned to keep to

myself, to hide from those I love. I fake it with a smile until that smile becomes real. My name

isn’t the reason that I’m down in the dumps, the real reason lies behind certain events of my

past, events that often make me shed tears while remembering them in detail. But I don’t let

them bring me down; I use the pain from these events to keep going, to keep smiling and being

the crazy teenager that I am, because overcoming all this is the best thing I can do.

I was six year old, living with my mom, and my younger brother and sister in my

grandmother’s house. We took the two rooms upstairs, if you could really call them rooms, it

was more of a loft with a room partially sectioned off in the top left corner with a bathroom in

the top right corner, but we made them serve their purpose.

My mother had just taken a shower, with a towel wrapped around her body and

another wrapped around her head and I was in my bed while my brother and sister were asleep

just a few feet from me. My mother poked her head into the room.

“Morgan? Are you awake?” she asked just above a whisper.

“Mhhm,” I answered.

“Why don’t you come into my room, I want to talk about something” she said watching

me from the door way.

I flung my short legs out of bed and padded barefoot to my mother’s room where she

was now sitting in the middle of her bed. She patted the bed in front of her, letting me know

where to sit. I sat down and crossed my legs, waiting for her to start.

“Do you know how babies are made?” she asked.

I squirmed in my spot on the bed. I knew the answer; I had watched TV, heard thing

maybe I shouldn’t have heard.

“Do you?” she asked again.

I nodded my head.

“Do you want to tell me?”

I shook my head. “No.” I know now that now that some other six year olds just would

have said ‘sex’ if they knew it but I couldn’t. I knew it was a word I wasn’t supposed to say and I

was embarrassed by it. I wouldn’t let it pass my lips.

“Well, what does the word start with?”

“S,” I replied, staring down and the sheets between us.

“And what does it end with?”

“X.” Still keeping my eyes down.

“And the middle letter?”

“E.” I didn’t understand why she had to ask me to spell it, I knew she knew what I was

saying since I said ‘s’.

“Sex?” she asked. I nodded my head. “Well, that’s one way, but babies are also made

when two people love each other.”

The conversation from that moment on is blurry in my head but I still remember the

content clearly. My mother informed me that Frank, the man I called daddy, was indeed not my

biological father. My mother talked about how she was young when I was born, 16, and how

my real dad wasn’t around when I was born and how she met frank when I was about a year old

and then had my brother a year later and my sister two years after that.

At six years old, I was old enough to understand enough of what she said but as the

years passed, I slowly understood the true meaning of that conversation. What makes me sad,

disoriented about it now isn’t the fact that the man I grew up calling ‘daddy’ wasn’t my daddy,

that doesn’t bother me at all, what bothers me is the fact there is someone out there in the

world who is my father. Sometimes I stay up at night and wonder, does he know about me? If

he does, does he ever think about me? Could I find him? If I did find him, what would he be

like? Would he be successful with a family or a pot head still living with his mother? Would he

welcome me into his life or disown me? All these questions often overwhelm me and more

often at not I end up falling asleep unwanted.

I was 12 years old when my mother told me the dreaded news; we were moving to

Virginia. My parents had been talking about it for a couple weeks, but my mom always talked

about moving, whether it was Idaho, Utah, Los Angeles, there was always somewhere that she

checked out the schools, looked into apartments but eventually, she would give up, deciding to

stay where were, where we were happy. But not this time, this time she was serious about

moving three thousand miles across the country to go stay with an aunt and uncle I hadn’t seen

in five years.

“You can’t tell anybody yet,” she told me. “You can’t tell anybody until I tell Angela.”

Angela was our roommate at the time, an old coworker of my mom’s, the ultimate

reason we could afford to pay the rent on a three bedroom house.

Of course I didn’t listen to her, I went to school the next day telling all my friends that I

was moving and my last day was the day before thanksgiving break.

It seemed that the time we finally left our house for the last time came much too soon.

My dad had left a week before to get things settled and to do some apartment searching so we

wouldn’t have to stay with my Aunt Ashley and Uncle Taza.

We weren’t driving directly to Virginia, fist we were going to grandfather house in Utah

to spend two weeks with him and drop off our cat, Squeaky. We couldn’t keep him because my

aunt already had a cat and my uncle was allergic anyway. After the two weeks in Utah, we

spend the next month in LA with my great-grandmother. Then we finally started our three day

trip to Virginia.

The next year was one of the worst of my life. I cried myself to sleep every night, for

home, for good old California. I had a hard time making friends, instead of socializing on the bus

like everyone else did, I listened to The Killers CD and soon memorized the words to every song

on it. I missed my family who were all three thousand miles away except my grandmother in

Chicago and my aunt and uncle who I felt uncomfortable around. I missed my cats, my friends. I

didn’t like rain during the summer, the sticky humidity, and the thunderstorms that seemed to

lack thunder.

I also watched my parents’ relationship fail, not that I was upset about it, Frank was

starting to irritate me; one instant acting like a thirteen year old boy and the next telling me

what to do. I was slowly losing my respect for him. He would leave whenever he wanted,

getting mad at my mom when she inquired about where he had spent the last three hours.

I was thrilled when I learned that we were moving back to California. We left at the end

of January and arrived back on Super Bowl Sunday. I felt happy to be back in the California sun,

to see all my old friends, to go back to my old school. It felt right again.

Looking back on that year, I am filled with the loss of what I missed out here, the time I

could have spent with friends. I still feel the pain of loneliness. I was never really a crier before

that year and now I feel that that year unleashed my emotions and now I cry a lot more.

Freshman year, I was fourteen and in English class when my friend Jessie told me I had to read Twilight.

I didn’t give the book another thought; if she brings it to school to give to me then I’ll

read it, if not, I’m not going to go hunting for it.

A few weeks later, after Christmas, I had a Border’s gift card and Christmas money to

spend. I must have spent hours at Borders looking for the perfect books to buy. I had a stack of

four books in my arms and enough money for one more. I picked up a book with a black cover

with two pale arms holding a red apple. I had passed this book multiple times, thinking there

could only be a whole shelf for it for two reasons; either it was really good, or they couldn’t get

rid of it. I decided to see for myself. I flipped the book over and read the few lines that decided

me:

“About three things I was absolutely positive.

First, Edward was a vampire.

Second, there was a part of him-

And I didn’t know how dominant that part might be-

that thirsted for my blood.

And third, I was unconditionally and irrevocably

in love with him.”

This little excerpt from the book intrigued me. It wasn’t the vampire part of the book

that made me buy it, but the romance it promised.

When I got home, I picked a book to read and it wasn’t Twilight. When I finished that book, I then reached for Twilight and the first chapter in, I was hooked. I went to school and told my best friend about how good it was and how much I already loved it.

I went into English class and my friend turned to me as soon as she saw the book in my hand.

“Hey, that’s the book I told you to read!” she exclaimed.

That’s when I finally made the connection. When I bought the book, I had completely forgotten about her recommendation.

“So, do you love it?” she asked.

“Yes!” I said back, glad that I had this book out for so many reasons.

“Tell me when you finish it because I’ll let you borrow New Moon, its sequel!”

Of course, I finished the book fast and had New Moon in my hand the next day and

returned it the day after that, in love once again.

Although I have read many awesome books, Twilight changed my life more than all of

the others combined. I started looking at the world differently after reading it, looking at guys

differently, comparing them to this perfect vampire. It also brought on depression. After

reading the third book of the series, Eclipse, I stayed in bed the rest of the day, feeling

unexplainably depressed, not wanting to join the world around me, at the point that I was too

sad, too in pain for tears.

Only later did I realize why I was so depressed. It was because in the back of my mind I

knew it was all made-up, fiction. The fact that such a romance, such a fantasy never happened,

never could happen to me or anybody else pushed me over the edge. And since that realization,

I’m careful to keep my depression in check, pushing it back and just staying in my happy place

that the story puts me in, ignoring the fact that it’s nowhere near real. Instead, now I use the

books to perk me up, to keep me smiling, to keep me laughing when I just want to cry.

These three events have helped me become the upbeat person I am by showing me

what the pain is like if I succumb to it. They motivate me to stay happy so that I don’t become

an anti-social zombie lost in her depression. I have learned so much from my past and I use it

now to be who I am, to be who I want it to be.