The Years of Me

CHAPTER 1 - Enter Stage Left

CHAPTER 2 - The Duality of ‘Dad’

CHAPTER 3 - BLANK

CHAPTER 4 - BLANK

CHAPTER 5 - BLANK

CHAPTER 6 - The Huntsman in the Classroom

CHAPTER 7 - BLANK

CHAPTER 8 - Counting to Dieci

CHAPTER 9 - Bullrush and Bullies

CHAPTER 10 - This Tale Starts at its End

CHAPTER 11 - Childish Crushes Can Still Crush You

CHAPTER 12 - Learning Loneliness

CHAPTER 13 - Flick of a Switch

CHAPTER 14 - Meeting of Fate

CHAPTER 15 - Drifting

CHAPTER 16 - Cooking is a Kindness, Family is Hard

CHAPTER 17 - Subjected to School Subjects

CHAPTER 18 - Meeting the Void and All its Friends

CHAPTER 19 - A Helpful Kind of Heartbreak

CHAPTER 20 - The Beige Year

It is strange to look back and realise that I was thankful for a birthday to pass by without any memories to mark its place in my mind. When I think about it, there are no thoughts to mark this year at all, it is book-marked only by the fact that it is lacking any substance.

It is the first year in many that has been simple, uneventfully beige, the lines of it smudged into nothing until its last vestiges disappear to make room for the rest.

There is a sadness to the peace I find in this. A bitterness coating my teeth.

It wasn’t a happy year. I think I spent most of it in bed—depressed, or drunk, or desperate to fill in the blanks, only to have it erased anyway. But at least there wasn’t some dramatic moment that led to tears or punches or screaming.

I know there had to be happy moments—friends, family, fun, but it is all blurred like I am trying to to catch the moments from the eye of a storm that refuses to settle.

I think I was exhausted. Tired from the chapters of before. Numbed by the depression that clung to my bones and the anxiety that ate at my skin. Weak from fighting everything all the fucking time.

Sick of who I was and everything I wasn’t.

I was losing a war with no one but myself to fight against, but at least there was no-one to help me dig the knives in deeper.

And eventually that year ended.

CHAPTER 21 - Learning to Live Two Lives

The turning point of Twenty-one.

This is where I learnt that being an adult allowed me to separate myself from the responsibilities as a child of the family and the freedoms of being my own woman. Both roles I inadvertently placed on myself and couldn’t work out how to remove.

This is the first time I remember having two birthday parties and equally enjoying both. Satiating two sides of a personality that had begun to stretch at the seams.

My mother hung decades worth of images on the walls so everyone caught glimpses of my life as they wandered the halls. Images of me depicting memories only held in the still-life, a taxidermy museum with no record of where, or why, or what. I had lived these moments and yet I had more questions than anyone else who brushed a curious glance across my life. The pages of my journal increasingly blank the more I try to recollect the details. I have grown accustomed to the missing pages, resigned to cling to all the good ones I manage to annotate.

At my parents' place we went swimming in the pool, I played with the children of the extended family, and opened gifts. We ate, cut cake, waited until the sun started to sink and went our separate ways.

I went home, cracked into the spirits and turned the music up. I remember my sister was there. I think this was the last year we were still talking before we weren’t for a while.

To be honest, I don’t remember much else.

CHAPTER 22 - The Start of a Wonderful Chaos

CHAPTER 23 - My First Apartment

CHAPTER 24 - Time to Start Tripping

CHAPTER 25 - Covid in Canada

CHAPTER 26 - I thought I’d Have Kids by Now

CHAPTER 27 - Moved States, Bought a House

CHAPTER 28 - TBD