Prologue
"Time changes everyone whether they like it or not." My best friend once told me this yet I laughed it off, saying only you could make changes in your life. I was wrong. Time does change people, it has changed me. I've grown up a lot in the past eight years, to the point where I'm ready to leave the life I built so carefully around me here in America. I'm not sure when it happened, or how, but time has come and changed me and it is written somewhere on the pages of my life.
Eight years ago I was a scared 13 year old immigrant from Dingle Ireland. I had spent a very rough few months on a boat with hundreds of dirty bodies and the crowds on the New York docks did not help to boost my confidence in my new home. Dingle had been a small fishing community, I knew everyone in the town, and I knew all the surrounding roads. Here I knew no one, all the faces unfamiliar and foreign, many different languages streamed through the air and the large buildings seemed to block out the sun. The highest point in Dingle had been the hill overlooking the ocean, but in Manhattan the highest points were the buildings. It was all so new, so dirty, and so exciting to a 13 year old who had rarely been out of her home town, let alone her country.
I arrived with my mother and pa, and many of my siblings, however, not all. The boat had been a horrible trip filled with sickness and sadness joined hand in hand. Many families lost their loved ones, and for the most part we thought ourselves lucky. Until midway through the trip where we started to loose members of our own large clan. It was emotionally draining and walking off the boat short a few members of our family was a hard one. My siblings were all I had in this new world, and to have a distant older brother, and much younger sisters and brothers made life hard on me. My adolescence was quickly taken away from me, as my childhood had.
Life offers many surprises, hardships and joys. Mine was full of them and this is my story.