Disclaimer: I don't own Twilight or these characters. Just the thoughts, though I did get some ideas from the movie The Eye. Song lyrics at the front from the song Wild World, not sure who its by. It played in the season one ending of Skins, though. Aha, read and enjoy, pleasee.
Wild World
You know I've seen a lot of what the world can do, and its breaking my heart in two
Just remember there's a lot of bad everywhere, its a wild world.
Different. That's what I was, plain and simple. It was such a clean cut term, you would never imagine it to come with so much baggage. I lived a normal life, I had a normal family and normal friends. And yet, somehow, I am still completely different. Abnormal. But never, ever special. If there was one thing I hated, it would be people assuming that I am something special simply because I am one thing not like the rest.
My mother was stupid. She got pregnant right out of high school and married a man she had been sucked into a false love with. They ended up divorcing a few years later and I never saw my father again. Now, at age sixteen, I have been sent to a town I barely remember to live with a man that I can't bring myself to call my father.
My mother loved me. She wanted the best for me, and she had never stopped blaming herself for my accident. When I was six the two of us got into a horrible car accident. Just another statistic, just another drunk driver, just another life. The man who hit us had died on the spot, and though the world viewed that as some sort of justice for the pain he had caused my own family, I simply saw it as a tragedy. I imagined his own family, grieving the loss of an overworked alcoholic, simply searching for peaceful state of mind.
Our windshield had shattered, the glass piercing my eyes and the impact knocking my mother out. I soon fell into a deep sleep after the crash, as well, but most likely due to the overwhelming pain exuding from my eyes. I awoke two days later, only to come to the realization that that one day was soon going to be etched into my memory as starting point for a lifelong curse - or maybe a blessing, depending on how you viewed the situation. That was the day I lost my eyesight.
I guess, in some ways, that day was a blessing in the disguise of a tragedy. My mother and I had both survived, and the only major damage had been the damage done to my eyes. With the blindness had also come my freeness from judgment. I was no longer subjectified to my own personal prejudices and fears - the world was like a giant, blank puzzle. All the pieces fitting together perfectly and equally as well, no single person sticking out any longer as the black sheep or nonconforming, indifferent being. Everything, to me, was of equality. Appearances failed to matter, and a skinny person became that of an overweight one, as a black man blended in with a white one.
That's not to say that I became a overly loving hippie - though free of the prejudices that eyesight brought upon people, I was still subjected to my own personal opinions. With the loss of eyesight came the intensification of my other senses - like smell, hearing, and touch. If a man wore way too much cologne or a mother spoke with an awful sharpness to her child, it was still a simple matter of whether or not their personality meshed with mine.
Though for a while it was hard for me adjust to my new lifestyle of reading Braille and using a walking cane, since I was introduced to the world of blindness at such a young age, it was much easier for me to adjust to the new way I was to live. Though my mother wanted me to attend a school for the "gifted", or in other words, the children that needed extra, special attention (there's that word again), I decided early on that I would much rather attend a school filled with normal kids. And so I did, and I lived on normally. At first the kids looked at me oddly, what with my eyes a faded grey and my tendencies to stick close to the wall as I walked around outside and in the classroom, but when you attend a school with over 6,000 kids its easy to blend in with the vast difference of everyone.
Ten years has now passed since my accident, and I would still be living that almost normal life if it hadn't been for that stupid, stupid accident. I play the violin, thanks to my mother wishing for me to have some sense of normalcy in my life soon after my accident, and I'm actually pretty good at it. I had a big concert I had been due to play at, and it had soon sold out after the tickets had first gone on sale. My mother had planned weeks ahead to attend, like the supportive mother she always was, and yet this quality of hers had been what had ultimately brought her to her demise in the end. It had been raining and the roads were way too wet for her crazy driving, and during my opening sequence number she had driven into oncoming traffic. One crash had been the end to her hope, and another crash had been the end to her life. If it wasn't so tragic and personal to me, I might find it quite poetic. Two months have passed and I haven't picked up my violin since.
Two months have passed of me living with this stranger, my father, Charlie, and in two months we have shared a total of zero meaningful conversations. Two months of him treating me like I was just a normal teenage girl, two months of me being grateful for that. Two months of him acting with complete ease and two months of me blaming my guilty conscious for everything that went wrong with my life. Two months of summer and finally two months ending. I guess I'll just have to try and make it through this thing two months at a time, at least until I turn eighteen and can move far, far away - to a place where memories can surpass me and I can just be at peace. Though at this point that seems close to impossible, its still nice to dream. The only difference between my own personal dreams and the dreams of others? My own are blank, dark, and shadowed - their colorless and faceless, ultimately picture less. Just like my life.