Growing up in the Summer
Growing up in the Summer
Over the course of a brief, yet eternally long summer, I ceased to be a child. The culmination of years worth of bickering and a marriage teetering precariously on the rocks became one single, two syllable word which I associate with my own personal apocalypse: divorce. Forced to pick up the pieces of my shattered reality, my simple 15-year-old mind was morphed into a whole new existence. Slowly it evolved, but it was emotionally hindered. The main emotion that illuminated in my mind was the deeply frustrating one called uncertainty. Over the first few days it took my father to pack up his whole life after the age of thirty and ship out, it was all that I could think about. Although I thought I would be prepared for that fateful early summer day by previous pseudo break-ups, nothing could prepare me for the floodgate of emotional turmoil that opened up and poured out all over me. Saturated to the core, I was devastated.
The next few weeks were an eventful haze. Occupied by innumerable verbal barrages of pure passion between my parents and the uncomfortable chats about how "everything will be alright," I felt more alone than anyone should dare feel. More and more I boarded myself up within myself, seeking the comfort of my own aloneness and never letting anyone share the grief of the death of my childhood. The more I thought, the more I missed my previous naiveté and simple existence, which I had lost forever. The chaos that was my mind continued to swirl on its own trajectory, never resting.
My dad picked up 15 years of his life and left all that I had known of him to my memories. I was slowly recovering from the intense shock of my situation and of my death; the only medicine was the ever-powerful experience. My days were spent all alone as my mother was working, my father nowhere to be found and my older sister no longer living with us. My little brother could do nothing to comfort me; he was drowning in his own existence. Each passing day filled me with more and more emotional turmoil and I was about to burst. Well, that happened a little while later.
Dad came back to talk to me a few weeks later just as I was finally starting to heal. Quickly my wounds were ravaged...