#it’s crazy she literally went from being kind but erratic to straight up a dumb baby 😭

[aleatoryalarmalligator]

Life Story Part 76

Even though I was very excited about Sarah’s return, it felt like such a long time since she had been in my life outside of our letters that the idea of her coming back didn't seem real or something that was fathomable enough to get excited about. I mostly just focused on my garden. But the day was coming up where I knew that she was going to  be back in Idaho. I was almost embarrassed. What if she didn't like me anymore? Neither she nor I could believe it. It was confusing because her coming back to Idaho in real life almost meant shutting down another kind of communication, being that we wrote letters to one another and expressed our thoughts that way. And that seemed strange.

Early that summer, my father decided to take us on a boating trip. He had his kayak, and there was another one for me he had decided to purchase. He decided to buy another small boat for David to use a flimsy plastic one, and, running out of money for some reason he bought an inflatable boat which I suspect he thought Allison could paddle and withstand the current with. I wasn't so sure, but he assured us all that it was doable. I had paddled in the kayak once before, that previous year around the same time (which I failed to mention), and it had been an interesting experience for me. I had paddled across the Snake River alone. I had been terrified, but I had done it anyway. It was in this area called Buffalo Eddy. It's this part of the river that suddenly is extremely deep, hundreds of feet down. The water there turns into a whirlpool and if boats aren't careful they get sucked right down. And on the other side of the river there is this Native American burial ground. In the 70's, some grave robbers went to the burial grounds at night and decided to steal a bunch of sacred heirlooms out of the burial tombs. My father said he worked out at the same gym as one of the guys. Anyway, on the way back, one of the guys got sucked down. People liked to talk and say it was a curse for having broken into the sacred resting place, which I am not so certain of. But it was hard not to remember or think about that kind of thing.

I had braved that area in the kayak. I didn't take my boat directly to the eddy, but I had to muscle it very hard not to be taken in by the pull of the water. It had been a health experience for me I feel. I felt a lot braver after having gone through it. This next boating experience wasn't going to be like that one. We weren't going to the same place. We were just taking the boats out a little ways from town where my father had one of his vehicles waiting to pick us up. My father headed our boating expedition in the really good kayak, and I followed behind. David was having troubles paddling, but it was Allison I was most worried about. As we were going down the river, it became apparent to me that she was struggling and there was no way this was going to work for her. She couldn't paddle in the inflatable boat – really a glorified pool floaty which instead was spinning in circles. Also, the little boat had a hole in it and it was starting to sink. I tried to go back for her. She had this desperate look on her face and I panicked. I tried to call out to our father who was way ahead of us. He couldn't hear me, so I cried out louder. I tried to call out to Allison, but she wouldn't answer me. While it was true that I was definitely panicking, everyone thought I was having an all out panic attack due to how loud I was trying to yell to get the attention of my father and trying to save Allison. I was worried about her drowning or us getting separated. But David and Allison both thought I was having an attack, and I wasn't. So nobody was answering me, even in the most basic way. I thought she couldn't hear me so I yelled even louder, and to her, fifty feet behind me, she thought I was just getting more insane.

Eventually my father heard us, and he yelled at me to 'knock it off'. I managed to attach Allison's boat to my own as we crossed to the other side and got nearer to the bridge that crossed between Lewiston and Clarkston. Our father went way ahead of us. I think he was pissed off at us. He was mad at me for freaking out, and he was mad at Allison since the flotation device was not something you could take down a river (the label said it was only for pools and recreational areas). We ended up getting to this very reedy marsh area full of slime on the sides of the river, and I realized that we couldn't all get through it. If we all were in our places on the boat, it dragged, but if we took it out farther, there was a current that would suck Allison's boat down. So we all had to get out of the boats and drag them in thick gooey mud, pushing through long grass for nearly two miles. It was quite a work out, and ultimately not a very fun experience on the river. Eventually, we got to the place where my father was waiting. He was on the phone with one of his online girlfriends. He was complaining about what failures we were, and how disappointed he was that he had tried to do something fun with us and we had ruined it. It made me sort of mad, but given that I was finally not pulling the boat anymore and I wasn't pushing through silt and muck I was relieved just to have my legs free. At least he wasn't screaming at us. We rested for a moment, laughed and sang songs from bad music videos we had found on youtube. We loaded the boats and stayed at my mother's for a few days.

This was around the time where my mother and father had it out. I can't remember how it all started. I just remember how it ended. It was at my mother's place. The sun was out and it was a hot early summer day. Lewiston is a very humid and hot place for Idaho. It has a much lower altitude and is more of a desert than anything else. Plus there is both the Clearwater River and the Snake River. I remember my father was in a poor mood. For some reason he felt my mother wasn't living up to some kind of obligation, and he wanted to talk to her about it in they front of the house as he was about to pick us up. He was hours late – as he usually is always hours late. I started getting ready to get into the car, packing my blankets and whatever I was currently working on into the back of the pick up bed. Suddenly my mother and father started yelling at one another. I was in the yard, and I don't even know what prompted this outburst, but my mother got pissed off, and started bitchily dismissing whatever it was that my father was trying to put out there. So then he got mad and they were yelling at one another, once again like it was still 1996. I remember being taken aback.

My mother called my dad some kind of name, was screaming erratically and then slammed the door and told him to leave. But he didn't. Instead, he decided to go right up to the door and start screaming that she was insane and an unstable bitch which was why her older daughters were crazy too (speaking of Roxanne and Maria), and I just sat there looking at him, knowing it was a bad idea, and a perfect example of a cheap move that would backfire, but being unable to say anything to stop it. My mother then flew out of the house like a frenzied wolverine, and picked up this door holding rock with two happy mice on it and the words FRIENDSHIP ROCK on it, and she flew at my father like a maniac attempting to bash his brains in. I belted out to my mother to knock it off! At that point because I didn't want the police to get involved or anyone to actually get hurt. Granted, I sort of saw that whole exchange, and a part of me couldn't blame her. Though I think my father's initial attempts at communication, though dickish had been somewhat understandable, his sticking around the door of her house screaming that she was insane (using mental illness as an insult), had been both a total prick move, and a poorly planned one. He was literally coaxing the wild bear out of her cave. He was on her property, and when someone says leave, you leave.

Anyway, my father avoided the rock. It was very easy to do as my mother is a terrible fighter. He was mostly afraid of accidentally hurting her, and suddenly had to get very real about avoiding getting hit with the FRIENDSHIP rock and restraining her attempts without accidentally causing her to hurt herself. But watching these two numb skulls try to get into each other's brains, my father psychologically, my mother getting straight to the physical brains, it was so pathetic. Though my self esteem left a lot to be desired, I couldn't help but feel that I was meant for better things. I remember in that moment looking over at the house, and just feeling this nothingness, this lack of empathy for the both of them. It was too pathetic for me. I looked up at the bleak ugly hills, and the dumpsters by the road, and I just felt so trashy. I let the fight sort itself out. Eventually my father was yelling obscenities at her, and she was slamming her door. I didn't even feel the need to take a side on that, but I talked with my father first about it since I was in the truck with him. He denied having yelled at her through her door – which was dumb because I was there and so were Allison and David and we all witnessed it – plus I knew him well to not be able to deny himself the last cheap shot word in. He eventually laughed it off. Later talking to my mother, she was more honest about what had happened. She was stupid proud of it actually. We did laugh though, that the rock had had the words FRIENDSHIP on it.

I ended up injuring my leg in the strangest way around this same time. It started with what might have been some kind of altercation between my brother and I. I woke up in the morning hearing David and Allison in some kind of fight. I felt nervous on behalf of Allison, so I went out there to see what was happening. I don't remember what the fuss was about, but I guess I thought I could end it in some fashion, or maybe David had said something that had made me silently furious. I don't really remember. I remember going out into the living room where the action was and everyone's eyes were on me, including my father's. I guess people saw me as some kind of make or break in arguments. They started continuing to say things back and forth to one another, but all eyes were on me. I ended up saying something to David, and he blew up at me, telling me that I always sided with Allison. I retorted that Allison didn't generally devolve to name calling and violence and as I said this, I attempted to sit down and then suddenly my left knee was in pain and I crumpled to the floor out of breath. At first I am sure it looked like I was having one of my attacks, but in reality I was stunned and in pain. My legs are strangely shaped. They aren't deformed per say, but they are very muscular, particularly my calves, and my knees stopped growing when I was young – so I have these really small knees, and they are very twisty. So what happened was my leg was twisted in this direction that didn't work for sitting while I was distracted with arguing with David, and I sat anyway and it tore some kind of tendon that holds your knee cap in place. It would never grow back and it still hurts vaguely at times, but fortunately the muscles in my legs are very strong and they just hold my knee cap in place anyway.

So, I had to hobble around in a leg cast that Carol lent to me for three weeks. It was harder to do things like water my garden, but I figured it out somehow, usually coming in with dirt and leaves clinging to the cast. Right after I fell to the floor, I remember my father gathering that it was a leg injury and asking me questions. It must have been weird, me being myself and then a split second later sitting in the middle of them circled around me confused while I shouted out in pain. I put ice on it, but found I couldn't really walk. Allison kept asking repeatedly if I was okay. 'Are you okay?! Are you okay?! Are you okay?!' When I had been younger, I used to yell and get angry when I was hurt and someone started asking me the obvious repeatedly, but I had recently come to this realization that if a person's heart was in the right place, who was I to chastise them? Anyway David then went after Allison for asking me the same question over and over and told her to 'shut up' and despite the pain, I guess I was incensed enough to tell him to let her say whatever she wanted. Which made him angry, and then the both of them had to go to school. Then I was suddenly in a quiet living room with my father's conservative talk radio playing in the background, as he got out everything he could find to fix my knee.

For a short period of time, my father was talking to a woman on the internet that he met, who ended up not being very mentally stable and became obsessed with him. She posted pictures of herself in her early twenties, and she was nearing her fifties from what I recall. For some reason my father didn't catch that mid seventies vibe off the pictures – though it was comically obvious, and instead decided to believe she was nearly fifty but somehow just looked fresh out of high school. He talked with her for a few weeks. She lived in Tennessee. She seemed to really interested in my father. After awhile though, he started getting weirded out. She claimed everything that he liked, was her favorite as well. She then claimed that she also used to play in a rock band, but then later changed the story so that she had managed one. It was getting weirder. She wouldn't stop making comments that my father was a spitting image of Vin Diesel. It was something that my father soon realized was some kind of obsession. It turned out that she had stalked Vin Diesel a little bit, not person to person, but through letters and trying to contact him, and eventually his people had kind of blocked her from trying as she seemed completely eaten alive by obsession. And she had seen my father's muscly stage pictures from a few years back on MySpace or some dating site or other, and decided to place that obsession on him instead. So after my dad realized what the situation was, he told her that he wasn't interested in talking to her anymore, and he stopped calling. She continued to call though. She began promising him stuff. She told him she had just bought an entire recording studio and was starting her own record company, and she wanted to sign him up. Which was obviously yet another big indicator that she wasn't someone he should be talking to. He eventually stopped picking up the phone, so she would just call over and over again. Eventually she stopped. But it took a few months.

Then my father started talking to this waitress whom he had been very close with in his twenties. He had always admired her but she had a boyfriend. It had been the eighties since he had last seen her – since she had moved out to Seattle. He found her on facebook, some new social media website that I despised because it was really boring and everyone really liked it better than MySpace. Her name was Patricia. She worked for rich and somewhat famous people as a live in nanny and cook. Most of her clients weren't insanely famous, mostly middle of the road television actors and athletes. She catered to very specific rich people meals – where everything about the food has to be perfect, or they would turn their nose up. My father was really excited about her, and about seeing her again after all these years. So after talking on the phone for a month or two, he traveled out to Seattle to visit her. He promised to come back with cool stuff, particularly for me since my twenty-first birthday was coming around.

I don't know all that went on, but I think he felt insecure because she had a very strange living situation with her ex. First of all, there had been a bloody gruesome murder on the property before she owned it, back in the sixties. Then a few years later someone else had committed suicide in the barn – which was still standing. So her house was kind of weird. She owned another house that was on the foot of her property (I think she inherited the property), and after she broke up with her longtime ex, he refused to leave, saying he felt emotionally attached too her property and couldn't imagine himself living anywhere else. So she went to a professional psychic who I guess told her that her ex was the reincarnation of one of the people who had been murdered? So she felt like she owed it to him to keep him living there, and she let him stay in this other house.

My father went into a super unique record store – the kind you mostly would only ever find in a city. I told him I wanted anything related to The Kinks and The Stooges. So he grabbed a bunch of this stuff, with my confirmation that it would be for my birthday. I was excited. But when he got back, he gave almost all of it to David. I don't think it was intentionally sexist. He had completely forgotten. As time was going on, my father's memory was getting worse and worse. So nobody wanted to tell him that he had completely bought the wrong stuff for the wrong people. Both David and I were confused. I could tell that David felt guilty, but he wasn't about to reject the gifts. I think maybe my father was trying to buy David's love. Allison had been given eighty dollars for her birthday. My father spent seven-hundred dollars on David's birthday a few weeks previous (their birthdays are close). Everyone in the house felt weird about it. Allison felt diminished like she didn't matter to my father at all. David felt really weird about what my father had bought him – because it was mostly spent on a four-wheeler. David had never professed to like four-wheelers at all. I think my father wanted to have a boring redneck son like many of his work friends, and it wasn't happening. David didn't really get a thrill from driving around and fast things. Since David's early beginnings, he really was bookish, more interested in collecting toys than he was playing with them. He was born to be an antiquarian. And it almost felt like an insult that my father knew so little about him now that he was getting older that he bought him something he would never use – and couldn't use. Going out and riding around on the four-wheeler would require my father taking the time out to go and do that. I don't even think my father liked four-wheeling come to think of it. The gift was oddly strange and impersonal, reflecting my dad's insecurities almost entirely.

What it came down to, was my mom spoiled David in her own way, and my father was afraid to be outdone by her. He told me himself one night when I was talking about it with him. So he couldn't emotionally control himself. He had to buy buy buy for David, thinking it would make up for something. There was this obsession with David's gender, that he was a male. In my father's mind, I think he felt like David represented him. David in the mean time, despite getting a bunch of stuff that just made him feel weird that he didn't even want – felt even more neglected and isolated by the gifts themselves. It was very dehumanizing. And he had to look at me, in tattered clothing with parents that couldn't even get me a social security card, and Allison who was just flat out forgotten by everyone, and feel really weird about his own place in the family. David felt guilty I think. He was coming to an age, where, despite his emotional and psychological issues, he wanted things to be fair. He had always been coddled compared to us, and fussed and fought over. It had kind of weakened him as a person – as he gained this deep seated sense of controlling entitlement, but at the same time he was feeling unwell about his position, and empathizing with everyone else around him. He wanted things to be justified and fair in the house. He didn't want to openly feel like an entitled little lord.

At the same time, he had mixed issues with me – since I was always approaching his abuses and letting him know they were wrong, and he couldn't control me. He still resented me for having been a terrible sister when I had been a preteen. I really had been awful, and it had deeply hurt him. Furthermore, there was never enough food in the house, and because of my bad eating habits, and my inability to properly know when I was full, because I was depressed and home all the time, and most importantly because my father didn't stalk the cupboards with anything we could ever eat, I ended up eating more food than him. And he resented me for that – saw me as piggish, and indeed there might have been some truth in that. I didn't know he was that hungry. He was getting older, and there wasn't enough food in the house for everyone. He recalls now that he often felt hungry at our father's. And you can't eat a four-wheeler, so.. Tensions had started building between him and my father since my dad had kind of abandoned him to date Trish a year back, but this, if anything, made things worse. It also didn't help that my father had this archaic idea that the father must beat down the son, else the son will surely rise  and take his place. Like, every father has to prove to his son that he's more powerful than him, and in my father's limited thinking – this translated into some insecure need to overpower David, if not by buying him things then by demonstrating physical power over David. It was really weird and inappropriate.  I mean – I suppose there are some situations where a son feels he must overcome his dad. I am not trying to diminish the universality of that familiar human narrative. But that narrative can take on many forms, in many cases totally symbolic. There doesn't need to be a clashing of swords or fists. David needed was someone to actually try to understand him, not beat him or surround him with trappings of family royalty.

I guess I can understand why my father was confused. His real dad had died when he was three years old, and he had grown up around his older brother Bob who had been a sadistic bully who was especially jealous of my father, and then his stepdad Art had spent a lot of time picking my father to pieces as a child in as cruel a manner as possible, making fun of his body and his face and his voice and everything about him as his mother, my dear Grandma Betty who was a typical meek woman of the fifties just looked down at her food at the dinner table in shame. Eventually Art tried to beat y father up and kicking him out over something very small, and from then on my father was mostly on his own to live among friends and relatives when he was only fifteen. My dad had started using alcohol and weed when he was twelve to cope with the constant bullying. He doesn't talk about this stuff, and doesn't like to define himself by this upbringing and maybe doesn't even see the significance, but I do. The more I grow to understand who my father actually is, the more I realize that he suffers from a very low sense of self worth going all the way back to his early life as a fifties boy who roamed the Lewiston hills chasing behind abusive male figures.

It perhaps isn't an excuse for who he became as a father to us, but it is also very cliché to expect people will just figure things out at a certain age, as if there is some kind of comprehensive guidebook on how to be a person, or what is right. I don't buy into that as much. I think we should always be introspective of our histories and our own psychologies, but not everyone is presented with life events that will cause them to reflect on life. Not everyone has the right brain chemistry to deal with things. So I don't blame him exactly – I mean, I have issues that won't go away, and there are problems but I know why they exist and I know what they are. My father isn't a monster. We all are just giant children, including myself. A person can't think a thought that wouldn't occur to them to think. It's wild what doesn't occur to people. What is common sense to one person is not to another. I was blessed with two broken individuals who probably shouldn't have reproduced for parents. It happens, and I try to make the best of that. They clearly cannot comprehend what they have done. I can see it in their eyes. Their realities and memories are really off, and kind of blank. I think there is a lot of humor to be gained from a rough childhood. It just makes me want to sigh exasperated though.

This all ended up on David's shoulders, as my dad simultaneously took David's gendered existence way too seriously, seemed at times to want David to become the father figure to him, and at other times felt threatened that David would overtake him in some way that went beyond anything that anyone in the house could understand. Anyway, my father's relationship with Patricia didn't go anywhere and she eventually wrote him a letter saying she thought he was a jackass and nonspiritual. He never understood what he had said to offend her, and though I think she was probably a little bit unstable herself, I am sure he must have said something. I can't imagine him not actually.

I was in the Walmart parking lot one day. They had just built a super Walmart in Clarkston, and we went to go get some groceries or tools or something. As we were leaving, there was a woman putting her baby in their car seat in the car next to us, which ultimately prevented me from getting to the front seat of the truck. I waited for a bit until she had sorted things out, and I slid by her carefully and just barely touched her door as I did that. She flew around and started screaming at me that I had slammed her baby's head in, and that I have violently shoved her. She began ranting at me, and coming towards me like she planned on beating me up. I can attest that her child was fine and I had no access to the baby's  head. I had slightly touched her door, and I hadn't meant to. I apologized, but she only began screaming at me louder, saying she was going to bust me up and stuff. I mostly felt confused. I barely ever left the house, and this kind of anger has always been really foreign to me. When it comes to most things in life, I have a strong pacifist nature about me, and even though I have a temper it's far more emotionally driven. People I don't care about generally cannot make me angry – with a rare exception. I wasn't about to have it out with this lady. She started calling me ugly and balling her fists up. My father came around the other side of the truck and started trying to defend me, which I realized he did a very silly job of. He just came across as a douchebag. He immediately upon asking her what the issue was, started trying to come up with insults about her meth use and the tattoos on her body. He just kept talking about her tattoos, calling her something very clearly that I remember and can still hear ' Go On You Tattoo Bitch!'

They way he said it almost made me cringe and face palm. It was so Reefer-Madness somehow. He said 'bitch' like he was a little boy who wasn't supposed to say it. It sounded like the sensationalized voice of a man in the fifties narrating about the evils of jazz music on our youth. And his focus on her tattoos was hardly the point. For some reason my father hates tattoos more than anything. In his mind, I had been accosted, not by her, but by the fact that she was a woman who had tattoos. I guess he stuck up for me though, so that's definitely something, else I might have gotten punched in the face. She screamed at us as we drove away. In any case, I had to laugh, and feel lucky she had not succeeded in beaten me up. And I know this is really weird of me to wonder, but sometimes I wonder what ever became of her. I wonder why she was having such a bad day, if she was indeed on meth – if she found help with her anger issue or her drug problem (hopefully), or how her kid is doing now. I doubt she thinks about me much though.

It was early summer and Sarah would be back in Idaho come a few weeks. I remember reading the Joy Luck Club and wanting to eat Chinese food all the time, as there were some in depth details on food in that book that made me hungry. It was probably due to the fresh vegetables and the sun, but I was starting to feel much better.

My father came up and explained to me that while he was in town Billy was going to be coming to the house to fix the back porch from falling in on itself, something that had to be done often with our house – since it seemed that when houses get a certain age, nature wants to take them down. I was supposed to give him a note my father had left for him. I really didn't want to hand deliver anything to Billy whatsoever. I could  barely stand the guy, but my father felt it very important to relay the information. Mostly it just made me nervous. I flat out didn't want to see people anymore. It was hard to feel ugly or obese and be around people who had seen me when I was younger. Not that I was ever thin.

And then  he added,  'He might bring Zack,' and my entire world busted from it's frame. ZACK WOULD BE AT MY HOUSE WITH ME IN THE HOUSE! This was not supposed to be a thing! I tried not to show it, but my brain had suddenly dropped into my throat and I couldn't breath. I had to sit there trying to remember what normal people look like when they are sitting. Now I really didn't want to be there. I almost wanted to object entirely, but I couldn't. It was literally a small task that had to be done. There was no getting around it and they could mess up the project if I didn't tell them. Billy of course had no phone so there was no way he could be called. This really did mean that I would have to go give the note to Billy. Zack would most likely be there too. I would be seeing Zack again! I really truly from the very bottom of my heart wanted to run and hide. I had written him too many love letters that I never sent for him to be traipsing around my yard or the porches of my house! This literally didn't make sense. I had long given up that we would ever see one another again.

I had some strange ideas about Zack. I remember him talking very prophetically about how someday he would get me and runaway to wherever with me – the land of never-being-an-adult, or whatever. It didn't make any sense, but for years when I had been younger it had all seemed very real, plausible and made a lot of sense to me emotionally. I had staked my heart on it for a long time. And then we had parted ways I had held onto the idea that he would somehow be brought back to me. But then I matured. I looked around me, read a lot, and started to understand that things don't always work that way. People don't always get what they want. Sometimes one small imperfect thing happens and the whole puzzle falls to pieces. There is no way to prove anything had any meaning or significance outside of itself. Not that I didn't enjoy believing it did just the same. Knowing that there was a vast sea of indifference and randomness in the world around me didn't even fully dispel the idea that some things truly might be meant to be. But at some point, I had come to sort of accept that he wasn't going to ever be in my life again. And I was 15% open to the idea that I may ever fall in love again. I wasn't hoping to. I still felt like I was holding onto the whole Zack story. But it was beginning to become just that, a story. I even questioned if I ever truly loved him. He had never done anything for me, and ultimately, I had done nothing for him. It had been us finding each other at school because we were both weird, nothing more nothing less. It had felt like so much more than that. It had felt like a religious experience – but suppose I was wrong. All kinds of people have religious experiences that are actually nothing. Why should I have thought myself any different? We had never actually ever been a couple. He had told me he loved me a million times and there were moments. But in the end it never came to anything at all. It made me sad, but that was what it was, and I was beginning to believe that there was something better out there, though I could scarcely imagine it. I just felt it.

And then he was outside my house, there to dispel the myth. Obviously he was there to do a job. It was strange, but I didn't even feel like he knew I was there, or like, being at my house made him remember anything. I could sort of hear him out there talking to Billy. They both seemed like mangy creepers out there, but they were paid to do a job so I guess they could look however they liked. I was shaking and nervous. I clutched the note in my hand. I looked myself in the mirror to try to solidify the reality of my existence, and I headed on out the door towards the porch. When I opened the door, the two of them stopped talking and looked at me quizzically. I got a quick glimpse of Zack. He was on a ladder. He didn't seem to be really seeing me. I could have been wrong about that but I felt like he was just observing something that was slightly confusing. He didn't seem aware that he had tried to write to me before I left the alternative school stating that I was dear to him or that he loved me or whatever. I knew he knew who I was, but there was something 'hollowed out' about him. He was hollow. I quickly looked down and mumbled what I was out there for. Billy and Zack looked at one another. They both reached out for the note. For some reason I didn't give it to either of them right away. This was the one and only exchange I had had with Zack in what seemed like decades, and I was going to think about it.

I looked down at his hands, which were large and covered in dirt, kind of bony – some strange mixture of a million things. They were the same hands he had had in high school and I loved those hands. I felt a calm certainty when studying his hand casually opening for the letter in my hand. His eyes  had changed, and I had to face it, they seemed rather dull. He dressed like a homeless person and he had a beard that I was totally freaked out by. But his hands were the same hands and I trusted them. So I carefully sidestepped Billy who was trying at this point to grab the note from me, and I gave it to Zack instead, who seemed more uncertain of receiving the note. It all was very strange, as Zack just handed the note straight to Billy, and in that moment I zipped back into the house. I ran into my room and shut all the doors in the house. I didn't know if the significance of what I felt was love or not. I knew it had been intense. Enough so, that I questioned if I was actually over Zack or not.

PART 75 - https://tinyurl.com/y9afl9of

PART 74 - https://tinyurl.com/ydfkomx9

PART 73 - https://tinyurl.com/y6vy2jeu

PART 72 - https://tinyurl.com/yaegqs9x

PART 71 - https://tinyurl.com/y6v3ln9a

My Life Story in Chapters, PARTS 1-70 (this link below will lead you to a list of all the chapters i have written thus far).

http://aleatoryalarmalligator.tumblr.com/post/168782771574/life-story-sections-1-70