A/N: In addition to wonderful reviews, I have received some truly lovely PMs and DMs about this story. I owe a lot of people responses, but I'm still on vacation with my family. I promise I'll get to them, but in the meantime, thank you all so much for your kind words. And, as always, thank you for reading mine. xo
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February 25, 2013 – Word Prompt: Scald. Plot Generator – Binding Blurb: In 500 words or fewer, write a short entry about everything going wrong at once.
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The arches and balls of my feet are aching from too many hours in heels, and I stretch my legs out in front of me, pressing the soles of my feet to the cool plaster of my bedroom wall. Pulling a cardboard box into my lap, I hear the creak of a floorboard outside my door; a beat later, a soft knock comes on the doorframe. I look up to find Charlie standing in the doorway, a steaming mug in his hand.
"Here ya go," he says, handing it to me, and I jostle it slightly as I take it, a small splash nearly scalding the skin of my thumb. "Easy," he murmurs, eyeing the box in my lap. "More sorting?"
I shrug, peering down into the box that appears to have absolutely no organization to it whatsoever.
"Sort of." When I look back up, he's still curious, so I shrug. "I was just thinking that maybe it's time I take some of my old stuff with me."
He nods. "Well, if you need a hand…" He trails off, an offer we both know I won't accept, and I nod.
"Thanks for the coffee."
Riffling through the box, I find a little bit of everything: schoolwork, photographs, magazines, stickers. About halfway through the jumble of clutter, I find a draft of a college admission essay; that I wrote it the summer before my senior year even started just goes to show how desperate I was to escape.
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Having nothing to lose can be liberating. People think it's scary, intimidating, dangerous, even, but really, it's freeing. Feeling as though there's nothing to lose makes a person fearless. It makes a person who might have spent her entire life being afraid suddenly willing to take big chances, risk big failures.
A few short months ago, I lost everything that's supposed to matter to a seventeen-year-old girl: I lost my best friend. I lost the boy I'd loved for years. I lost my self-esteem. I lost myself. I lost my feeling of invincibility. If I'd been writing this essay six months ago, you'd be reading something likely very similar to the thousands of other essays you're reading. Something steeped in optimism, hope, and humility. In naiveté and ignorance.
But losing all of the currency a teenager has to offer has changed my outlook on the future; in truth, it's changed my outlook on a lot of things.
If I don't get into your school, I'll go somewhere else.
If I never love a boy the way I loved this one, I'll never be hurt this badly again.
If I don't let myself get so mired down by fear, I'll spend more of my days being fearless. Daring.
There is value to be found in the moment everything goes to hell. A person can learn a lot about herself when she hits rock bottom. Of course, my rock bottom is a relative one, a first-world, teenage-girl rock bottom characterized by social ostracism and angst-ridden solitude. Still, whether or not one is actually at rock bottom is a moot point; if one feels that she is, she may as well be.
I once heard someone say that the best thing about rock bottom is that there's only one way to go from there: up. What I didn't voice at the time but have since spent some time thinking about is that the sentiment, while optimistic, isn't entirely true. After all, we live in a world filled with people who hit rock bottom and don't go anywhere; instead, they choose to wallow on the ground floor. They don't go farther down, but they don't claw their way back up, either. So really, at the bottom of the well, one has two options: wallow, or fight.
My life went to shit.
But what I'm learning about myself in the aftermath is that I want to be a fighter.
Because rock bottom isn't the place I want to be.
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