CHAPTER ONE
I’m here.
I’m still here, safe and sound. I didn’t disappear into my black hole.
Ali is my childhood friend. She tries to visit me often as much as she can. We talk for an hour solid every time. She’s lovely. She really understands me. She sits there and smiles, and laughs at my semi –jokes, and makes me feel like I’ve really got some good qualities, not just a load of bad ones, which is what I’d always assumed.
She says I seem a lot happier. Well I am! I’ve done a lot better, and I’m recovering up nicely. Who wouldn’t be feeling better? Well, me, that’s who----because it’s not long since I was not happy at all. I was in a very bad place.
But I’m in a better place now, and I told myself, I’m never going back.
When I was seven, my mother left home. I haven’t seen her since. I don’t really remember the last day I saw her, though I do remember the last day I didn’t see her; it was two weeks after she’d walked out on me and my dad. She was supposed to be taking me to my friend’s house and she never turned up. Dad told me she must have had a good reason, but if she did I never got to hear it. I heard she moved away, got remarried and had two kids. But dad doesn’t like to talk about her.
I don’t call my mother ‘mum’ any more. I used to, in my mind, even though she wasn’t around. But after a while, when I never saw her again, and those ‘lovely-sweet’ motherly letters stopped coming, it didn’t feel right, so I gave up.
My dad married another girl. I still hated her for taking my mother’s place, but now I call her ‘mum’. Edna is now my mum. She is my mum. Because if you think about it, she is someone who is there when you need her and who cares about you, and that’s what you call ‘mum’. She deserves to be called my mum. My mother is still my mother, always will be, no matter what she did, but now, Edna is my mum.
Everyone has good days and bad days, right? I think most people deal with those bad days--- they shrug them off without a second thought, or have a sociable night out with their buddies and talk about their bad day until it doesn’t seem as bad as what they think. They let the bad days fade and let the good days stay bright and clear in their minds. That’s the healthy way to manage your worse scenarios in your life.
Some people aren’t like than though. They can’t handle such scenarios, and it’s like the good days aren’t really the ‘good’ moments any longer. They forget how to be happy. I was like that----I was one of those people who couldn’t feel happy. But I do feel happier now, now I’m starting to work a few things properly.
I’d always been a worrier, still am. Things bother me. I’m a perfectionist--- Ali told me that. Even at freshmen school, if I made mistake in my homework I’d have to write the whole thing out again; I couldn’t bear a crossing out. Thank God for my computer!
Or if I fell out with dad, it would take me ages to get over it, wherein he’d have forgotten it the next few minutes. And when dad and mum first got together I was a no-go area for weeks.
I was always up for a laugh, but I could get really fed up about things, dead easily. If I had to describe me, I’d say I always had a serious streak. Things always went right down deep with me.
So, when I think about it, the day my mother left was my first seriously bad day; not only because I wasn’t with my friend’s house, but for the fact she left out nowhere. It must have gone to the bottom of a deep, dark hole in my brain. It stayed down there, buried under more and more ‘bad’ days that for some reason I never let go of. Without me knowing, I became one of those people who can’t handle bad or worse days.
