I was working at Burger King that summer. I had ditched my mall job at the Children’s Place earlier in the spring. They were unhappy with my constant need to have this day off or that as my senior year schedule heated up. I needed a lot of Fridays off, a lot of evenings for [...]
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I was waiting alone in front of a grocery store on a warm, May day in 1988. I thought I looked pretty good, actually. I had picked my clothes carefully; I can still remember exactly what I wore. Black pants, a black tank top, and a white cardigan style knit top over the tank top. [...]
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It was official. Despite a rough year filled with roller coaster worthy ups and downs, despite several attempts at trying to take my own life, despite the therapy sessions that I was sure no one else I knew had to engage in, despite rotten choices all around me and self destructive behavior, in spite of [...]
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The new semester brought a new schedule at school and a whole new set of experiences. I was trading out my awful prerequisite typing class for an opportunity to be an aide in Mr. H’s classroom, my English teacher from two years prior who had turned into my counselor/advisor/closest thing to a friend a former [...]
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Journal Entry: 12-25-1987 “Today is Christmas Day, 1987. This Christmas seems really humble as far as it goes, pretty ordinary. But I came to a big realization today, and it is embodied here: I trust, I have faith, that I never had before. There is a part of me that is content, even though not [...]
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All of my friends had dates for Homecoming my senior year, but they encouraged me to go anyway. My friend Karen was going with Alan, who probably had a huge crush on her. My friend Dawn (who I’d had a huge fight with over my crazy competitiveness about our writing…she was right, and I was [...]
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It was the second week of September in my senior year, and I was staring at a blank page. My advanced composition teacher, Mr. V, had assigned us a journal to be kept over the course of the year. My literature teacher the previous year had done the same, and by the end of the [...]
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