Chapter 1

     Ian knew he had no place to go.  The world was a confusing place for him from his birth until now, and he figured that it would remain that way for the better part of his life if not all of it.  Everyone else seemed to have direction, a place to go, but for Ian there was no plan or future destination.  He had all the potential opportunities short of wealth, and truly he was poor his entire life.  Ian's father told him many times over about how he had struggled through life, and it was likely that Ian would too.  Their family was large, made up of six children, Ian being the youngest.  They all lived week to week on their father's paychecks which barely cleared the family for three thousand dollars a month.  Despite all of this Ian's brothers and sisters seemed like they knew what they were doing with their lives.

     Alex was the oldest now at thirty-one, and he had joined the marines straight out of high school.  Dan followed suit being just two years the junior of Alex.  Rebecca was a year behind Dan, and she was married and having children while working part-time for a department store, happy with her life.  Ryan, just twenty-six, took a different route becoming a mechanic after going to the high school's trade school instead of pursuing the regular curriculum.  Finally Meredith was a year and a half older than Ian at twenty-three, and she was going to college, the first person in the family to do that.  She was aspiring to be a journalist, and with just one more year to complete to achieve a bachelor's degree in journalism it looked as though she would finish very soon.  All of them had overcome being born into poverty, and their mother and father were very proud of them.  Ian was the last to come along in the family, and at the age of twenty-one he was uncertain about what he would do with his life.  He felt complacent.

     He had never had a steady girlfriend, and he worked pretty often doing factory work like his father, the only one to follow in his father's footsteps.  As a general laborer there was not much money to be made, and he had honed no particular skill.

For Ian life was hard, and this mostly because of his indecision. He had always thought that there was purpose to everyone else's life but his own. He saw what his siblings had done or chosen in their lives and it made it all the

Author's Note

As time permits will be expanding this