blue bird

1 - Black, White and Grey

Home.

Home has been the same place to my family and I for about six decades. My grandparents met in our hometown, Barry's Bay back in 1952 and got married in 1956. They then had three kids, my aunt Sami, my uncle Pat and my dad John. They all had grown up in Barry's Bay however my aunt had run away when she was fifteen which is my age now. From the stories I have heard, she was gone for five years before she came back. Although when she returned, she did not come alone. She had given birth to a boy, my cousin Francis. She rekindled her relationship with my grandparents, my dad and my uncle and moved back into their house in Barry's Bay. Later that year my uncle Pat and his fiance Elise had my cousin Tammy.

This was the start of my generation. Two years later they had my cousin Tane and then another year passed when my cousin Keiva was born. Keiva and I are the same age but she is a few months older than me. The last child of my generation was born two years after I was, my brother Manu; the youngest of the group.

We grew up with each other and have watched each other grow. Sometimes we fight and argue and sometimes we say stupid things but we are still family. At the end of the day we all love each other, we just do not always know how to express it.

We are all so similar yet so different. One major difference between us all is our appearance. My brother and I have half Canadian and half Samoan genetics. My cousins Tammy, Tane and Keiva have full Canadian genetics and my other cousin, Francis has half Canadian genetics only we do not know what makes up the other half. His father was never in the picture and no one knows who he is except his mom.

My mom and dad met in Toronto in 1975 at school. They got married in 1978 and moved to Barry's Bay with their diplomas and experience in writing and hairdressing.

I thought I had known everything about my life, from my hometown to my school to my friends to my extracurriculars and even to my very own family. Everything I had ever known was right in front of me, nothing needed to change and nothing needed to be fixed.

There was always a part of me that felt different from what I knew or who I knew but I had always pushed that feeling aside. That feeling so deep where it caused me to fall heavily into my own mind. Thoughts both negative and positive, spiraling in my head, offering power or lack of.

Some days were black and filled with anger, fear and guilt, others were white and filled with joy, comfort and strength but the worst were the days that were grey. Grey like a cloud of apathy, no emotion, no worries, no remorse....nothing. Grey days were rare but caused the most pain. My grandma had told me to focus on the good in life but some days there was no good to look towards.

My family may not be perfect, we sometimes are not even functional but we are loving and quite an interesting group. Only I had no idea how interesting of a group we were until now.