Don't Let Go
Epilogue
A/N: Thanks to all the readers who have followed this from the beginning all the way back to the first story. I appreciate all the reviews and encouragement.
Emily Scott
College Application Essay Stanford University
Who are you: A reflective essay.
There have been many people over the years that have had some sort of influence on my life. There have been writers, musicians, my grandmother, even a politician or two. But no two people have had a greater influence on my life than my parents. I couldn't tell the story of me without them; they are the reason that I am who I am.
My parent's story could fill the pages of a large book. They have a long and memorable history that dates back to their years in high school and has become somewhat legendary in our small town of Tree Hill, North Carolina. He chased her for years and one day she finally stopped running and they've been together ever since. As different as they may have seemed, he was a star basketball player and she was somewhat of a tortured artist, they had more similarities than anyone could have imagined.
My mother Peyton was a girl when her mother, my grandmother, was killed in a traffic accident. Her father raised her by himself and although he loved her he spent much of his time away due to his job. From a very young age my mom had to learn to raise herself. My father Lucas was born to a single mother fresh out of high school, his father had left town for college and while he was away he'd gotten another girl pregnant and chose to raise that baby as his own and pretend my father never existed. This of course had a negative effect on my father, but he never let that stop him. My parents found themselves bonding over their single-parent upbringing.
They went to college together, got married and after graduation they bought a house in Raleigh, North Carolina. They kept their distance from the small town they had grown up in and started a new life somewhere fresh and without the memories of their childhoods. It wasn't until my paternal grandfather became ill and later passed away that my parents returned to Tree Hill and eventually moved back. I was born a few months later.
It's a very surreal experience growing up in the same small town as your parents. I was able to live their history in the most vivid of ways. My dad taught me how to play basketball on the same court where he had grown up playing, I worked behind the counter of my grandmother's café just like both of my parents had as soon as I was tall enough to see over the counters, I even had the same art teacher in high school that my mom had. There were remnants of my parent's history all over the town and I seemed to discover them every time I was out exploring, I still remember the time I found their initials carved into the trunk of a tree on the edge of the high school campus. When I asked my mom about it, she just smiled and got lost in her memories.
I grew up as an only child and although my parents never said different, I know that they would have liked to have more children. I was born premature and my mother nearly died on the operating table during her caesarean section, she found out a few years after I was born that having more kids wasn't possible. If it ever really bothered her she did an amazing job of hiding it. They considered adoption when I was older but it never happened, even though I still believe any kid would have been lucky to have them as parents. I sometimes took that fact for granted, but I've learned my lesson since.
My best friend growing up was my cousin Sydney. Our fathers are half-brothers and our mothers have been friends since high school. Syd is a year younger than me but we've been inseparable since we were babies. She's an amazing person with the biggest heart. As kids she used to drag me down to the animal shelter on the weekends before the sun came up and volunteer us to walk the stray dogs for the entire day. I have learned so much from her and my aunt and uncle. We spent so much time together that I look at my Aunt Haley and Uncle Nathan as a second set of parents.
I had a very traditional upbringing thanks in large part to the fact that my parents matured into what I considered, very normal adults. My parents worked extra hard to give me the childhoods they were never able to have. I spent so much time with my parents when I was young that they were practically my closest friends. Before I started elementary school I spent my afternoons with my mom where we could be found sprawled out on the carpet of our living room listening to the stacks of old vinyl she had acquired over the years, or in my dad's office
I fell in love with music because of my mom. To her, music isn't something you listen to; it's something you feel. She's always said that a great song is something you can still feel deep in your soul years after you've heard it. I still remember the first time she played "Like a Rolling Stone", not many five year olds list Bob Dylan as their favorite musician but I couldn't get enough of his music. The first concert I ever attended was a Fleetwood Mac reunion tour gig when I was eleven years old with my mom right beside me singing "Rhiannon" at the top of her lungs
People usually give me strange looks when I tell them that my mom is an artist. They must picture a female version of Jackson Pollack, an insane woman hunched over a canvas splashing buckets of paint all over who doesn't have the tightest grasp on reality. She's anything but. My mom started out as a freelance artist, doing small jobs here and there. She even designed cd covers for a few of the local bands here. It wasn't until she started doing small art shows and displaying her paintings that people started taking notice, important people. Her work has become popular over the years, Dakota Fanning may have bought her latest piece for a nice sum of money but I'm still her biggest fan.
I fell in love with a different type of art. I've come to discover that photography is a passion of mine. For the last three years I've had a camera at my side, snapping pictures of everything and anything. There is something amazing about capturing a single moment with the flash of a shutter. My bedroom walls are covered in black and white snapshots taken from around town of people I know and many whom I don't. I look at photography, as a way of telling a story, behind every shot no matter the subject there is an amazing and undiscovered narrative. The best picture is one that has an impact and inspires, at least that's what my mom tells me and it's something that I keep with me when I'm taking shots.
My dad could be considered an artist of sorts but he uses a completely different medium, words. He's a writer at heart that still has dreams of writing the next great American novel. But in between writing chapters of his book, he earns his living as the sports editor of The Carolina Chronicle, which has the largest circulation in the state. He loves his job as it gives him a chance to work from home and spend more time with all of us.
The way my mom and I have bonded over our love of music is the same way my dad and I are about books. When I was very young it was my dad's nighttime ritual to tuck me into bed and read a Dr. Seuss book to me, he also had a habit of reading a chapter of whatever he was reading at the moment to me. His favorite was always The Old Man and the Sea. It's safe to say that I knew more about the theme of personal courage in the face of defeat than the average five-year-old. As I grew older my dad and I would talk books over dinner and critique the increasingly annoying trend of making books into lackluster movies that would never be as good as the original medium. It was a Sunday morning ritual for us to spend an hour browsing the dusty aisles of a used bookstore near our house, while my mom slept in late. We keep our ever-expanding collection in my dad's study, bookshelves tall enough to reach the ceiling are crammed full of paperbacks and hardcovers.
For me books have always been an escape from my reality. If something was happening at school or at home I knew that I could forget about it, at least for a while, by burying my nose deep into the crisp pages of a book. Whether it was John Steinbeck or David Sedaris, I could get lost for hours while reading. As a kid my father used to have to hide the flashlights so I couldn't use them to read under my blanket long after I had been tucked in for the night. My dad use to use books as a way of indirectly talking to me about certain issues that he wasn't all that familiar with, I still have the book he bought me regarding puberty and the young woman. I also have the book he bought me to answer my questions about cancer.
If books helped me escape from reality, music was my way of avoiding it all together. When I was fifteen years old my mother was diagnosed with cancer, leukemia more specifically. To this day it remains one of the darkest periods in my families life and mine. Facing your mother's mortality forces you to grow up much sooner than you'd like. I didn't handle the news well at first, my initial reaction was anger and I would spend all of my time at school or locked in my room with headphones tucked into my ears blasting loud enough to block out noise. It was unfair of me, but at that moment I wasn't ready to accept the fact that my mother could die. I spent a week avoiding the news and my family when I came home one day and found a book on my bed. It was a thin paperback written for patients and their families, I read the entire book cover to cover that night. The next morning I got over my own selfish fears and accompanied my mom to the hospital where she spent the next seven nights receiving her first round of chemotherapy.
After months spent holding back my mother's hair as she vomited from the constant rounds of chemo, reading endless volumes of text on cancer research and most likely annoying her doctors by asking them an enormous amount of questions I came to the sudden realization at the age of sixteen that I wanted to become a doctor. It's a goal that both of my parents have gladly supported even though they have had a hard time accepting the fact that their only daughter could potentially be moving across the country in order to pursue this dream, but I think they've realized how serious about this I am when pennants and posters for Stanford began to fill in the gaps between band posters.
I know a lot of kids who are going to college out of state so they can get away from their parents and enjoy their newfound freedom, but for me that's not the case. My greatest fear of going off to college three thousand miles away is that I will spend all of my time missing home and my family. I've lived in Tree Hill all of my life and growing up I couldn't imagine living anywhere else but I've come to realize that it's important to experience new things and to live your life to the fullest, no matter how clichéd that may sound.
So who am I? I'm just a girl who loves Johnny Cash and John Steinbeck, a girl who is both incredibly excited and completely terrified for her college acceptance letters to arrive in the mail, a girl who isn't ashamed to love her parents, a girl who wants to follow her dreams and make a difference. This is me.