part iii-b; double bass
kiba
I hate the fact that people always feel the need to analyze everything that I do.
So what if my dad left before I could even remember him? So what if I had to fend and take care of myself earlier than most kids? So what if I didn't have the classic family with an older or younger sibling, mom, dad, dog and white picket fence? The real world doesn't work like that. That's not reality. It's not my reality.
Besides, how I was raised or what's happened to me in my sixteen years of life doesn't make me any less of a person than the next. So I made a few bad choices, but doesn't everyone? I'm still here, aren't I? Doesn't that count for something?
I guess everything started when my dad left my family when I was only three. Like I mentioned before, I don't remember him at all, so why should I get all angry and sad over it? It pisses me off, but what can I do about it? He's gone. Obviously if my family had meant anything to him he would have tried to contact us in the thirteen years that he's been gone. But he hasn't. And that's just how things are. That's just how things were left.
Anyway, that left mom with picking up after his slack. She began working two jobs to support the three of us, and that left Hana, my older sister, in charge of me most of the time. While mom worked, I would stay with this old lady that lived on our floor for the day. When Hana got out of school, she would pick me up and the two of us would be home alone for however long we had to be until mom came home. Hana was eight when all of this started, and honestly, I look up to her more than I do my own parents. She did her best to look after me, but it was a child looking after another child. She wasn't an adult. Hana couldn't provide for me in the same way that my mother should have been doing, but she tried to fulfill that role, and I know she did what she could.
The system worked for awhile, and when I started school, things got a bit easier. But like everything else in my life, it didn't stay that way for too long before things started to fall to shit. When I was about seven, things with my mom started to get a bit crazy. My mom was always a bit of a drinker and she used to be a heavy drug user before Hana and I were born. When she met my dad, she had stopped using and drinking for awhile. With him gone, it was only a matter of time before she lost what stability she had and regressed into who she used to be.
As time went on, she barely worked anymore and the house basically turned into a drug den. When Hana and I returned home from school every day, we'd never know what the hell to expect. It was in those days that I began to learn how to defend myself.
Mom never took out her rage on Hana, it was always on me. I was always her target. Everything she felt, her frustrations, rage, anger, and stress, anything she felt was taken out on me. She was always screaming about how I looked just like my father, and how I was going to turn out exactly like him if she didn't beat some sense into me. She always told me it was for my benefit and that she was helping me.
Back then, I didn't know what to make of it.
I was always under the impression from my mom that my dad had been a horrible person and I didn't want to be that type of person when I was little. I didn't want to be the person that would upset my mom as much as he had. What type of son would I be if I did that? And yet, as time went on, I saw the differences between how my sister treated me and how my mom treated me, and I began to understand what my mom was doing wasn't right.
A little while she had turned eighteen and graduated from high school, Hana moved me and her out of our old apartment and into a new one a few miles away from our old town. She wanted to get the two of us as far away from our mother as she could. And yet, even with the change in enviornment, the damage my mother had dealt to me had been done.
Something inside me just snapped. I was tired of taking shit for something that wasn't my fault. It was around this time, a little bit before my twelfth birthday, that I started acting out. In the next two to three years, I got into fights with people all the time, started stealing, cutting school on a daily basis and getting suspended and expelled. Hana did everything in her power to try and figure out what my problem was, but I just wouldn't talk to her. She did what she could for me, but between working all the time and college taking up so much of her time, I was often left to my own devices for the majority of the day.
The summer I turned fifteen, I started using and occasionally selling drugs. I met this guy Shino. He was quiet and a bit weird, but he was just like me in some respects. He came from a broken home, and the only place where he found peace was running the streets doing his own thing. We would ditch school so many times to just smoke pot and pop pills, just getting high to do whatever we want. The only times we ever really went to school was to sell drugs to someone, any other time we just ran the streets.
In the beginning of my junior year, Shino eventually got busted for the possession and selling of marijuana. They sent him away for awhile, but when he came back in the spring of the following year, he was completely changed. He distanced himself from me, and personally I wasn't having that.
The guy I said I held up with a knife? It was Shino.
I wasn't lying when I said I had a bad temper. I'm quick to fight someone if they say or do something I don't like. It's gotten me in trouble loads of time, but I've always been able to get myself out of trouble when I needed it. But not this time. I was so angry that the only person that I felt like I had had some connection to, besides my sister, had left me, changed on me. I felt like I didn't know him anymore, and it was getting me so angry. Shino didn't bait me; I was the one who couldn't control my actions. He remained silent the entire time I yelled at him and tried to coerce him into a fight.
Long story short, when they found us, they arrested me and expelled me on the spot. Afterward I was immediately shipped off to juvi. I stayed there for a month or two before the judge reviewed my records and finally decided the best course of action was to send me here.
Hana was absolutely livid with me when she found out what I had done. When the courts found out about my living situation and after questioning my sister about where our parents were and my mother's inability to properly care for me, Hana was granted legal guardianship over me at the age of twenty two.
So as a result of all this crazy shit I've got to spend the summer here and do this program as part of my probation. It's to 'rehabilitate' me for the real world or some shit. After I successfully complete the program here, I've got a ton of community service to go through and some other stuff I've got to do. I'm still angry about being here, but I think the longer I'm here, the more the anger goes 's whatever. At least the kids here aren't timid and afraid of me like the ones back home are. Primarily because they don't really know how bad I can get.
It's whatever. The only thing I'm really focused on is giving Hana a peace of mind. After all of this transpired, she's been so worried about me and I guess if I'm able to to do something positive that'll give her less of a reason to stress and worry about me, I'll be doing something right.
At least ...I can do that much for her by being here.
