Perspectives

2. Nahuel

I didn't hear about her until I was in fifth grade.  I heard my mom and my brother arguing about how "Nahuel couldn't know."  I had heard this same thing many times before and when I asked about it, I got the same reaction I always did when talking to them.  They had no idea what I was talking about.  I must have heard them wrong.  Clearly there was no such thing as magic and a girl who was magic was out of the question.  Even then, I wasn't stupid enough to believe that.  So, I went upstairs and researched the "girl" everyone was talking about.  It was very difficult to find information about a girl with magical abilities when no one believed she existed.  

My name is Nahuel Casteñedas.  I live with my mother and my older brother Tommy.  I don't have a father.  He used to be in my life, but I was too young to remember him. From the bits that Tommy ever told me, I knew that he did something very bad and my mom told him to never come back.   Quite honestly, I don't even know if he is alive.  I have just accepted that he was gone all of my life.  I was raised fatherless and, the way my mother acted in his absense, motherless as well.  

I have always had depression.  There are pictures of me when I was a child and I was frowning.  Even as a baby, I could still see the bad in the world over the good.  The glass was always half empty for me.  And as for those who believed that someone in their life would fill the rest of the glass, they were liars.  I don't believe in love for I have never known of a time when I felt it.  I have never known of a time when anyone has felt it.  My family hasn't ever said those words to eachother and my mother clearly never had it.   

I only see things one way.  I see the way life fits together unevenly like a puzzle that a crazy mastermind has ruined each piece of.  My piece of this puzzle was named Nahuel.  I was about five foot nine and very, very skinny.  My father was Mexican, a trait passed on to me along with my dark curls and brown eyes.  To each person in the world, I was average looking; a normal Mexican boy who looked down at the ground in moments when there was nothing to say.  I was lonely.  Sad.  I wasn't sure I would ever be happy.  See, I am a dreamer.  And the problem about dreaming in this world is waking up.  The worst part is reality.

"Nahuel?" my mother said, turning around in her seat gripping the wheel nervously.  Her ring finger glittered with the wedding ring that she kept on for some reason.  I rolled my eyes and looked at her readying myself for her fake niceness.

"Yes mother."

"I've heard a lot of good things about this school.  I think that this might finally be the right place for us."

She lies.  We haven't felt anything good about the other places we've lived and I don't understand what is different about this one.  Tommy looked out the window of the front seat, dreaming.  We both had that quality.  

This was the Nahuel that I have grown up to be.  Maybe one day that would change but there was no use dreaming like that the way things were.  There would always be a time when I needed to wake up.