People always told me I was different. The way I walked, the way I talked. I was never good enough to fit in with the rest. But that didn’t matter to me; I never wanted to fit in. When you think of it from my point of view, I was just autonomous! There were times where I asked myself why I couldn’t fit in. I mean my characteristics were rudimentary. I had dark brown hair, dark brown eyes, a tall and slim figure, but in my heart I knew I always would be different and that, that’s just the way things were.

Most of it all started when I was thirteen, I was living my mom in our small, two bedroom apartment. At that moment things had been really tough since my dad died and we had just recently moved to New Jersey. We had only lived in the new house for two months and I already couldn’t stand it! I thought my dad would have always been the one to tell me everything was going to be alright, he always knew how to appease me, but now that he was gone, I was all alone. I started to debilitate. Starting a new school didn’t help much either. Everyone there were just a bunch of sycophants! The teachers would constantly reproach me because I would never consummate my work. Sometimes it was so difficult to understand what they were trying to say. Either they would confuse you by talking in a circuitous manner or give you the worst laconic answers. It didn’t bother me though; see I turned out to be one of those students who no one wanted to have in their class, so the first chance one of the teachers got to send me out they took it! It would always please me to see the ugly looks on their faces after I left them sublimed with the rude remarks I would make towards them.

Going to school wasn’t even the worst part. Every day I had to walk two miles to get home, but I usually took the abridged route just to get there quicker. My mom stopped caring whether or not I was home, like me she wasn’t the same after my dad died. She stopped cooking, cleaning, and quit her job as a bank manager. The fact that the only moment in the day you would actually catch her moving off the couch was so she could replenish her glass of water and pick up another bottle of pain killers. She always seemed to be so stressed about everything; then again I would be too if I had just lost my husband. I miss the days she would call me her little bunny, but now the only thing she had time to say to me was “Go do your homework” or “Get out of my face, don’t you have better things to do?!” Of course my mom was never this mean to me, it was just the stress. I constantly tried to admonish her about taking to many pills, but she was a grown woman and she wasn’t going to stop and listen to me. It would have been just a squander of my time if I tried to convince her to stop taking pills and drugs. It was just a complete waste of time…

I never thought that watching my mom make all these terrible decisions would ever in a million years influence me! I didn’t want to be like her, not anymore. Watching her become so sick, it terrified me to watch her fall asleep because I was so afraid she would never wake up! I was so bemused. Nothing ever made sense anymore. As I lay in bed every night I asked myself, why am I still here? My dad use to tell me I could accomplish anything if I just kept trying, but at that point I was done trying. There was nothing more I could do. Soon after that I started to go insane. Angry at the world and angry at myself, how could I let my family fall apart like this, why did everything have to go so wrong? I feel like it would have been easier to have just died, then and there on my cold bed in the small room. In my heart I knew god was watching me, he said that I could move on and to be different. I felt as if it was the first time someone had actually told me that it was ok to be different. The only other option I had was to change who I was or at least who I had become.

It didn’t take long for rumors to start spreading. As they started from the other people living in the same department as us, it eventually spread to everyone around school and they were all talking about how my mom was a “drug addict” and I was some kind of “crack baby!” It made me so angry to hear them whisper these things, I just wanted to turn around and hit the next person who said one more word about it! The next thing I know I’m being called to the guidance counselor’s office during my first period class. My conjecture was that she found out the same way everyone else at school did. I sat there patiently waiting for Mrs. Connor to say something, but she sat there reading through all of my school files and paperwork. She started to ask me all these questions about whom I lived with and why we had moved to New Jersey. I personally didn’t care if she was trying to help me; I wanted her to just mind her own business. After I had finally answered all of her questions I asked if I could go back to class, but that’s when things started to get serious. Mrs. Connor told me things at first I was incapable of processing through my mind! “If your mother doesn’t start to take better care of you then it is possible that the government will sequester you from her possession and send you to a foster home,” she said looking straight into my eyes. I quickly glanced at her and then turned my head. “Do you understand what I’m sayi-” “Yes, now can I please go back to class?” I answered without giving her a chance to finish. Everyone in the office watched as I stormed out with tears running down my cheeks. It broke my heart to think of losing my mom! The more I thought about it I finally came to realize there was nothing left for me to do. I couldn’t change anything now, things were much too complicated. I knew I had come along way, but the path I chosen to go was so awry.

I didn’t get to spend much more time with my mom that is since the government had arranged for me to be sent to a foster home. My mom had lost full custody of me and that was when I was finally able to call myself an orphan. I spent six years in the orphanage until I was finally old enough to check out and take care of myself. It didn’t get any easier from that point on. I had no money, I couldn’t get a well-paying job and I never stayed living in the same house for too long. This wasn’t always the way I saw my future, it was actually the complete opposite. Maybe if my dad hadn’t died I wouldn’t have ended up having such a horrible life. I could have gotten good grades, gotten into college. I could have gotten married and had children. You know just the way I promised him I would. But none of that mattered to me anymore; the person I once was is not the person I am today. My characteristics are immutable and I am ok to be different from everyone else in this cruel world.