Chapter 1: Changes
Mornings suck. Especially Monday mornings. You have ages until the weekend, you have the worry of whether or not you forgot homework set for over the weekend and so many other things that I wasn't prepared to contemplate at six in the morning.
I groan as the alarm clock goes and get out of bed as slowly as I can afford, savouring the warm feel it gets only after you've slept in it. I run to the bathroom before any of the other kids in the orphanage wake up and hog it. After a short shower and I brush my teeth, I get back to my room as quickly as possible, the cold floorboards almost painful under my bare feet. I dry off and throw a random combination of clothes from my wardrobe. Who would I be impressing anyways? It's just school.
After I throw on my clothes (dark green, long sleeved top, black skinny jeans and combat boots/leather jacket combo) I dry my dark brown hair and brush it into something close to neat, but never achieving it, due to the irritating waves and loose curls that hung down around my face. After a quick dab of lip balm, some black eyeliner on the lover lash-line and a squirt of perfume on my neck and wrists, I was ready to go. I grabbed my bag on the way out and pop into the kitchen to grab a cereal bar, before heading to the hall and picking up my skate-board, before leaving the orphanage before anyone wakes up, like always.
It's not that I'm anti-social or anything, it's just they are scared of me. They know little of my background and my upbringing, so they try to avoid me. Don't get the wrong idea or anything! I didn't do anything bad as a kid, or have a rep or police file.
My parents were travellers. Not gypsies, just two people, normal people. My mother was a High School teacher and my father was a martial arts instructor (they met when my mother took his class). They were two normal people who loved and craved adventure, so they saved up enough money so they could travel the world and see amazing sights together, forget the ordinary lives they had led before and do something new, something amazing. Then I come along and it completed the picture. The perfect little family, separate from the world, doing their own thing. Up to the age of five I just went along with them, but once I hit the age when most kids start school, my mother decided I needed some sort of education, so she started teaching me while we travelled. With mum being a High School teacher, it meant I had a good education. That, paired with all the culture and knowledge I was continuously exposed too meant that I learnt so much. I could speak five languages almost fluently by the age of nine, I knew many martial arts from spending time in China and my father, dances from places all over the world, had eaten so many weird things that French snails were like hot dogs to me and could still read and write, do maths, English, science and geography (not to mention suffer through Latin...). I had seen so many beautiful things that would leave anyone breathless.
But in the end, none of that was important. One day, when I was thirteen, we were walking down a street in Bayville, our home town. It was the place they grew up and we were waiting for our next trip to begin. That all changed when my parents became the first victims of a bank robbery shoot out. My father died of a bullet to the head, my mother of three in her chest, piercing the lungs and heart. I got away with one in my right shoulder (the small circular scar still there).
My parents had seen so many things and we had so many memories, but all of that was gone in a flash. Every time I tried to remember them, it hurt. The memories were untouchable. Every souvenir, every cheesy postcard, every mug, every t-shirt, every photo held so many memories that they just caused my heart to feel like it was being ripped out of my chest.
So I locked them all away. In a small suitcase I kept under my bed. The thing is, when I did that, I made sure to leave my heart in there with them. I stopped trusting people, stopped trying to connect with them. I was just alive, not living. Correction: I am just alive. Nothing's changed since then. I doubt it ever will.
The kids at school and at the orphanage have come to realise this. They don't try to connect with me, nor I them. We co-habit a planet, a common area, but we are hardly on the same page, in the same mind set. When you see so many beautiful, strange things, it can ruin the little things that make the world beautiful, because you feel that you have seen better, bigger and greater things. When you see these strange beautiful things and you then try to forget them, you lose both those beautiful things you saw and you lose the ability to see the normal ones as well. You are left with nothing. You are left with grey, black and white. I was left with grey, black and white.
Anyways, after my parents died, I was placed into the local orphanage and have been there for the past three years. I'm sixteen now, and still seeing grey. Figuratively speaking, of course. Nothing new, nothing exciting. The same thing day in, day out. Until today, that is.