I was never the kind of girl who gently collapsed or slowly crumbled. I never fell to the ground in a graceful, spiraling faint. I always came crashing down, falling at twice the speed of light, slamming into the ground with an impact that could rival Armageddon. I was like that tower of blocks you built as a little kid. It stretched so high, nearly scraping your childish sky, but as you moved to place the final block on the top of your masterpiece it came tumbling down, each block slamming separately into the ground, bouncing slightly and rolling into place, next to a dozen other askew pieces of misconstrued childhood perfection.

Ever since I was a little girl I tried so hard to be strong, to be grown up, to be perfect. I thought that if I was good enough daddy wouldn't keep leaving. I thought that if was strong enough I could make mommy stop drinking. I thought that if I was perfect my family would become perfect and I could be like all the other little girls who spent their time trying on make up and playing Barbies.

I didn't even like Barbies; I just wanted to be normal.

I kept trying so hard, praying desperately in my childish, little girl voice that I could make my family perfect. Every night when mommy led me through my prayers I would pray that she would stop drinking and daddy would stop leaving. I pinned all my hopes on that one name, I sent all my prayers to him, to that mystical being who mommy said protected daddy. She called him my guardian angel

And then I grew up.

In the space of a few hazy moments I had gone from an innocent and naive four year old who dreamed of Barbie dolls and blue eyed guardian angels, to a jaded thirteen year old who dressed in black and wore too much make up.

That was the year the twin towers in America were hit, the year I first started writing, the year daddy got sent to Kabul to help keep the peace, and the year mommy got so drunk she forgot to pick me up from school. That was the year I stopped calling her mommy, and the year I stopped trusting my guardian angel. That was the year my best friend Kelli ditched me to be with the cool girls, and the year I spent homeroom talking to the biggest loser in school, because everyone else was too cool for me.

That was the year I realized that nothing had ever been right with my life. That was the year I realized that every time I loved someone they left me, starting first and foremost with the man I loved the most, my daddy. That was the year I realized that I'd never had a relationship of any kind go right, and that life really was a bitch.

The year after that we moved, daddy came back and mom stopped drinking. We moved to a little town called Degrassi and I started high school there. I met a girl named Ashley who went by Ash and the cutest boy on earth, he was Italian and his name was Marco. For a while we were happy, Ash was my best friend and Marco was my boyfriend, but he was gay, and she had her own problems.

Summer flew by in a warm, lazy wave of AIM conversations, sleepovers, and trips to the mall. That summer was almost perfect, it was all screaming pillow fights, and thirty thousand car trips to the mall where we blasted Emo songs and screamed along with them while eating candy and telling each other our deepest darkest secrets.

Ash hated her father, Marco was terrified of his, and I wanted mine to stay with me forever.

But the gods were against us and summer came slamming to a close, crashing into the first day of school and dying away without a sigh. I started losing them that year, we all drifted apart. Other things pushed their way between us, homework replaced hour-long phone conversations and co-ops replaced trips to the mall. Ash spent her days with Craig, and Marco spent his watching Paige's older brother. We didn't tell each other our deepest darkest secrets anymore.

Ash didn't tell me that she was in love with Craig, Marco lied to me about why he was attacked and I didn't even tell them when I started cutting. Actually I never told them; they had to get by on rumor alone, just like the rest of the school. There were still some good times, Marco and I still watched Bollywood movies together and Ash and I were in the same band, but it wasn't the same, our perfect friendship had faded, and Marco and Ash joined the ranks of people I loved who left me.

And then Caitlen had me go undercover. She wanted me to get the scoop on the thefts at Degrassi Community School, so I went undercover as 'Ellie Nash, the girl who cut class because she was bored.' It was Raditch's brilliant idea, Saturday Morning Detentions, all us bad kids were stuck in the cafeteria to reflect on our wrongdoings, not that there was much to reflecting going on. Toby was doing his homework, Hazel and Jimmy were talking, Sean was stealing food and I was doodling in my notebook, like I said not much reflecting was going on.

And then something strange happened, it was creepy, like a breakfast club remake or something like that, but we got to know each other, and we became friends. The athlete, the princess, the criminal, the basketcase, and the brain became friends.

But even stranger than that, was that I met my guardian angel there, in detention. It makes no sense, him being my guardian angel, but it was true. He may have been a thief and a thug, but he cared about me, and he was there to catch me every time I almost came crashing down. He was the glue that held me together. He did something no one else had ever done, he promised not to leave me. And I believed him because when he kissed me my knees felt weak and I could hardly stand, because when he held me I believed that everything was going to turn out all right, because we instantly understood each other, because we fit together seamlessly, we were two sides of the same coin, so alike, but so different. I believed him because he loved me and I loved him.
And because he had the same blue eyes as my guardian angel.

But then he left. He told me that he loved me as he turned and walked away. And in that second, my fractured, barely beating heart shattered into a thousand tiny pieces. Pieces so tiny that I knew I would never find them all, so tiny that I knew they would never fit back together.

After he left I felt myself slipping, but I held on, plastering a smile across my face and pretending everything was fine. But my skin was tearing and I was losing my grip, my fingers were bleeding and I couldn't hold on.

And I'm like that tower again, the one you built as a kid, with the wooden blocks in the corner of your preschool classroom. This time I was the greatest one you had ever built, tall and majestic, so damn close to perfect. But just like all the other ones it came crashing down each piece rolling into place, mixing with the other blocks, creating a broken masterpiece of tainted perfection on the bleached carpet of your classroom.

The glue that held me together had slowly dried and turned to dust and the wind blew and I came crashing down harder and louder than ever before.

That was the tower that made you want to stop building, the one you knew you could never fix. That was when you stood up, and knew it was over. You had grown up, and the tower that had been Ellie Nash sat in pieces in the corner, collecting dust, because it could never be perfect again. Because I could never be perfect again.