everything exists in the future.

one day i'll be pretty and skinny and smart, and people will like me. one day i'll do the things i want to do. one day, i'll decide to go travelling and not let the fact that i have no money stop me. one day i'll stop trying to avoid the issue, or even just avoid the homeless guy on the street, who probably is the issue. or at least one of them.

i like to say that i live in the present. screw what happens tomorrow. i don't even know where i'll be in an hour, let alone a week, month, year. this is just a cover. what it hides is the fear of doing, of being exposed. the fear about being found out.

since the theme of the day is being self indulgent, why not start at the beginning.

The Story of My Life

my mother was 17 years old when she got pregnant. my father was 19. i was an accident. either that, or a mistake. i really have no idea when my father decided to leave. i know i was young. i may not have even been born when their relationship crumbled. but that's what happens when you're young and stupid. it doesn't last. funny thing is, kids don't go away when you decide you don't want to take care of them.

i was born on march 7, 1982. without a doctor. because my mother was so young, and i was her first child, they didn't think the labour would go so fast, so the doctor took her sweet ass time eating dinner and missed the whole thing. apparently, the nurses just let my mother do her own thing.

i don't remember a whole lot about my early childhood. most kids don't. i know i was a weird kid who had a habit of running around the house with pants on her head yelling "tick a die, tick a die". i know i used to bark at fire hydrants. i used to think that hellicopters were going to land on my head, and i would only eat watermelon if my mother called it "strawberry melon". i used to think that my wrist was my income tax return.

we moved around quite a bit. when i was 2, we went to calgary. i don't remember much about that either, except for this kid named david luingi who used to follow me home and write love stories about me which he would then read to the class during show and tell. i hated him. i wanted to kick his ass.

i can't remember when my mother started drinking, or when i noticed that she was. i have flashes of being in a car, and having her friends pulled over for drunk driving. or the time she put on that song about it being blue monday and just crying. i don't remember her drinking being a problem until i was about 11 years old, and we were living in grande cache again.

one week, my mother disappeared for three days. i went to go stay with my grandmother, who lived a few blocks away. one morning before school we got a phone call, and some man asked to talk to me. when i came on the phone, he said "we have someone here who would like to talk to you." my mother came on the phone, and i found out that she had been drinking with some people who had decided to go driving down to the river. they had crashed the jeep into the water, and she had to swim across. many people have died in that river, but somehow she made it. i was embarassed.

i spent a lot of time being embarassed. friends would come over, and she would be passed out on the couch. if i asked her anything, she would just mumble yes, and continue snoring. my friends thought it was funny.

later, when i was older, my friends went from thinking my mother was funny, to thinking she was so cool because she would let them come over to our house to drink.

i was 13 years old when i started drinking. maybe that's why i don't drink that often now. it's almost all out of my system. it started with my friends stealing alcohol from their parents, and then went to finding older kids to buy it from us. one night when i was 15, a friend and i got drunk at another friend's uncle's place. he was in his thirties, and kept trying to hit on my friend. our parents came to get us, and we took off. we spent the night hiding in the trees and crying, telling each other stories from our past. she told me about how her grandfather had molested her and how no one knew about it. i told her about how an older "friend" in calgary had tried to rape me when i was 6. eventually, they found us, and took us back to her house, where my mother and her mother proceeded to get drunk and then yell at us for drinking.

i used to skip school a lot when i was younger. i was a master at faking sick. the funny thing was, i even had the doctors fooled. it wasn't until i went to a new doctor, when i was "sick" that i was found out. he told my mother that i wasn't physically sick. i was depressed. maybe he deserved a medal for that. at any rate, i was found out. the game was over. around the same time, i decided that i wanted to move to vancouver. i really had no reason for it, but it was just something i wanted to do. i spent the next few years trying to convince my mother that we should move, but she didn't bite. when i got to grade 12, i realized that if it was going to happen, it'd have to be for university. so i applied to UBC.

it was the only school i bothered to apply to. i had offers from some other schools. full scholarships and such. which i rejected. instead, i took out a student loan and left. i remember when i got off the bus (i couldn't afford a plane ticket), and went to get a taxi. i was so completely scared. i doubted everything that i was doing, and it's really a wonder that i didn't turn around and go back. all of my friends, my family, everything i knew was back in alberta. but i got in that taxi, and well, here i am.

- posted by moreawesomethanyourlife @ 8:57 AM