I was told to write a brief testimony in class starting with the phrase "Life hit me hard when". The teacher said it was okay to write something fictional if we didn't feel like sharing our actual experiences. So I wrote a note at the beginning of my writing:
"The following journal entry is a fictional account, due to the author's current inability to express his own feelings directly. Instead, he has opted to write about the feelings of an imaginary individual whose experiences and emotions he shares in a more general sense."
I wrote the rest up in five minutes. In-class writing is so much easier when you have a keyboard at hand. Anyway, the next time class met she handed the writing back to me and told me that she thought it was plagiarized because it didn't sound like the way I normally talk. Dude, how is she supposed to know? I hardly talk in her class, let alone in the way that I normally would have talked when in my own element. Meanwhile, the fictional account comes from the perspective of someone who's writing her thoughts on paper, which is far more patient than man. I think that our thoughts naturally come out differently on paper than when we express ourselves verbally. Just saying. The language I used didn't seem all that unnatural to me, but she kept on emphasizing that I be natural. Well, I got a perfect grade on that miniature assignment anyway, so I'm guessing she was just looking for something to criticize.
Anyway, this little bit of literature is based off of a character of mine, Nixie from the IDES continuity (not that anyone has been keeping track), and I wrote it thinking that I was going to share it with you guys anyway. Enjoy!
Dear Journal,
Life hit me hard when my parents got divorced. I was lucky I was eleven and old enough to appreciate the reasons. My poor brother Mickey never heard of the concept before. To imagine Mother and Father officially apart must have been alien to him. I at least saw it coming. Dad was never around home. He was married to his work. I guess he loved us in his own way, but he was silent and didn't talk to us. The most I ever saw of him was around the holidays, but even then he was a man of few words. He would mostly let Mom talk to us, and when he spoke on his own it was usually only to solve disputes between me and Mickey.
It still hurt that he didn't know how to love us in the way that we wanted. I love him, too, but I just don't know how to have a relationship with him. He's a very smart man, so in part I found that I could connect with him. In some unspoken way, he understood me, understood my desire to learn, to sharpen my mind. Mom understood, too, but in a factual way, like it was cute, but it wasn't a reality she shared with me first-hand. With Dad, I guess he saw a bit of himself in me. I didn't know how to acknowledge that and still don't. I'm definitely different and set apart from him, but he's a fundamental part of my existence, half the story to my very origins in this universe. Yet, I can't have a relationship with him?
The saddest thing is that things aren't very different. I don't live with him anymore, but I still see him just as often. he and Mom merely live in different houses. The biggest change is that I don't get to see Mickey at home anymore. Now I have to look him in the eye and know that I get to live with Mom's attention and he doesn't, that his life at home is empty and lonely. Then i can't help but wonder if it would have been better if we switched places, for he surely needs mom more than I do, and if anyone can feel a bond with Dad it's me. How can I be a comfort to Mickey? When I go to school, will I be his proxy mother? I'm too young to be feeling this much nostalgia for a simpler life.
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