This is an excert from my 2008 novel. It's probably one of my favorite pieces of my writing thus far. I am actually really proud of it and I just wanted to post something here since Tuesday starts the crazy life of a NaNoWriMo novelist.
(Note that this is fully unedited. Hey, come on, it was Novemeber, who edits!!!)
Taken from NaNoWriMo 2008 "The Italian Bracelet" (unedited)
I would sit and watch as the children at the house next door played. They would jump on their trampoline and they would laugh and sing and be happy together. I learned a hood could hide someone for a short amount of time. My hoods hid my insecurities for some time and I would sit every day and watch the little kids jump around on their trampolines while I sat outside on my deck cold. They were carefree. I longed to be carefree. I longed to be able to jump with them, my hair down catching the wind as I coming plummeting back down to the springy surface of the trampoline. The neighbor girl was maybe eight her brother was a year younger than me in age and six years younger than me in maturity. He still went outside and played and had fun with his friends. I never did that. I hadn’t done that since I was in the fifth grade. Whether it was because I had grown up or because people decided they no longer liked me was suddenly in question every day I watched them bounce. The never knew I watched, they were too caught up in their laughing and fooling. I was jealous. I wish I could be my age, and like the neighbor boy have no cares in the world even when there was homework to be done and papers to be written.
Realizations can happen at the weirdest time. We talk about society every day in history class, and on some days, I actually do take in what my crazy teacher is telling me. I actually go home and think about it. As I watch the neighbor girl jump I watch as she grows tired. The same way I had grown tired dealing with the world around me. The way I grew tired jumping through hoops to be with my best friend when she had other interests. The neighbor girl would then proceed to sit down on the spring surface and spread herself out. She was hot from jumping all that time and she tired. It was time for a break. Was that what was going on in my life? Was I just on a break from my old clique? Was I going to get back up and continue jumping again and go on like nothing happened? That’s what everyone would tell me. They would say we were just petty girls. That was true. We were petty. We were girls. But I never believed for a second that we were petty girls fighting. This time was different we were fighting over more than just a boy. And maybe we weren’t fighting at all. Maybe we were disagreeing. I think there is a fine line between fighting and disagreeing. Disagreements can lead to unseen points. I did not see her point and she did not see mine. We no longer saw eye to eye, we saw heads butting heads. I didn’t think this was going to be one of those times that I could get up and continue to bounce as if nothing happened. I think the trampoline broke under the pressure of our disputing and unstable ideas of one another.
The trampoline could be taken other ways as well. Laziness maybe. Was it that I was possibly too lazy to fix my relationship with my “best friend” and so I just laid down and gave up? I don’t think I ever gave up. I just stopped trying. There was little point to it. But maybe that is how all of society is. We work for so long and we push ourselves to the limit and then all we have to be lazy and take a break. Too lazy to fix out problems, too lazy to make dinner, too lazy to do our homework, that was society, and that was how we all functioned. The working class was being laid off left and right and we were becoming lazy because we didn’t want to work to find a new job. So we sit in front of our televisions everyday and watch reruns of old shows from the 90s. That is one exciting way to live life. I wasn’t lazy or I tried not to be. I tried to do my work, I tried to do my chores, I tried to fix my problems, but sometime those problems either didn’t want to be fixed or couldn’t be fixed. I wasn’t lazy. I worked my ass off instead of sitting on it all day. Society blames the world for it’s problems. I know better than that. When I have a problem, I know it is my problem. I try to put in on myself. I try to fix it. I’m not lazy. I should still be on that trampoline jumping up and down like a little child. I want to be like a little child.
Growing up is a hard thing to do. I never wanted to do it. Who would really want to? It’s a lot to take on. And I don’t mean growing up physically and by age, I mean mentally. I always wanted to stay in that childhood world where we could fly and where we could be anything that we wanted to be. But truth be told, we can’t be what we want. I will never be the president of the United States, nor will I ever want to be. I will never be an actress even though I’ve always dreamed of it. But I wanted to remain as a child. There was something about that dream land that made life seem …less depressing. But truth had to come out eventually, and we all have to grow up at some point. Well, most of us. Some of us cling as long as we possibly can to the little last bit of a dream we have. The world that was created for ourselves. A world of green skies and blue grass, or a world of magic and magicians where nothing in the world came over come the strongest of warriors. Or my favorite, our own fairy tales. Everyone had a prince in mind, and every dreamed of having that prince whisk them off their feet someday. I, myself, had a fair share of people I imagined to be prince charming, but after years of heartbreak and disappointment, I learned that there was little to no point in trying to have a prince charming. Things like that, fairy tales, didn’t exist. It was pointless of me to pretend that they did. We all had to grow up at some point and come with realization that things weren’t what we wanted them to be. I found myself having troubles with those facts. I wanted things to go back to normal. I wished that I could travel back in time and change what happened with our fight. I wished that our fight had never happened, but it did and that was reality and I had to live with it.
I liked to think I was different from the general society. I wasn’t lazy in the fact that the fight happened and I couldn’t change it. I wasn’t really lazy about it at all. I just didn’t want to get up and fix what couldn’t be fixed. Like the rest of society, I grew tired of jumping on the trampoline at one point or another, and I knew that getting up was almost pointless. I knew that I had fallen hard enough that getting up would take more energy than falling down and staying down.
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