MARROW: The Crimson Odyssey

Chapter Eight: A Brush With Hope

CHAPTER EIGHT 

A Brush With Hope 

1.16.12

I had no friends, no family...I didn't just feel alone; I was alone. The excruciating awareness that I no longer had anything that kept me tied to this world was the most frightening experience I had ever been subjected to. I walked into my house, closed the door and stood there for a moment. 

"What was there to my life if I had nothing?" I thought. I couldn't remember who I was, there wasn't a single person that I hadn't pushed away or stabbed in the back, and now it was all crumbling down on me. "John and my mother were the only people I had and I couldn't even remember them!" I gripped my head as the thoughts rang throughout, sliding my back on the door down to the floor. Then I realized something... "Memories." I thought. 

I decided that in order to find some sense of who I was I had to go through my journal.  

"Maybe if I could remember I could find some way to keep on going. I could fix myself, make myself better. This time around I wouldn't be so disconnected and malicious...This time, I would be different." I believed. 

I quickly began flipping through pages of the journal starting at the beginning in 2006 where I discovered how I met Kaitlynn. It was January, I was a little over 15 years old and it was the New Year Formal at Salem Academy. The entry described her as one of the most beautiful girls I had ever seen. As I continued I also discovered that I had purposely hid her away from my family as well as my family away from her. So everyone was right, I was closed off from most of the world, if not many people I had claimed to be important in my life.  

I thumbed through and found pictures of old times as they fell out of the pages, some of them kept in by little cuts in the sheets of paper so the photo would perfectly fit in the folds. One I found was of a younger time. It looked like I was 14 or so, the picture unfortunately was a little worn so the other figure that was standing next to me I couldn't make out, but I could tell that she was in fact a girl about my age. It stuck out to me most because I was happiest in that picture than any other. That includes some of the pictures in there when I was a happy-go-lucky toddler. Cute, but nowhere near as blissful as the boy in this specific picture was. 

Though I noticed no matter how many pages I went through nothing seemed to pop out at me. I so very much wished that I could remember this faded picture and who it was in it. Only on the back in pen, also faded and even smudged it read 'Rosalina and Me' with a crudely drawn heart underneath. 

"Hm..." I thought, "Who was Rosalina?" then it hit me. "The girl from that memory...This was her? Wow...Beautiful." I thought, even though I couldn't see her face... I sighed. I continued as Kate became a more dominant topic that filled page after page. 'She was beautiful' 'She was lovely' 'She understood me'. "Bleh..." I thought. It made me sound sappy and overly corny. In fact I believed most of the entries with her in it were just nonsense written through a boy with too many hormones. "Eh, I was young." I thought to myself. I could understand how I could write that, but it just made me think more about the fact she dated both myself and my brother. Again it made me feel awkward, but I ignored it as I read on. 

I learned more than remembered, but I did in fact remember some things, as I continued through the journal I specifically remembered a nice plane ride. My mother was actually a pilot before she was diagnosed. I remembered as I read about an event where we flew over to an island and had pizza just for the heck of it. It made me smile for a moment. 

Going on I learned more about my brother through memories of when I once visited his school for some talent show. I suppose that his school was full of delinquents as I described it as juvenile and irrelevant to anything to do with real education. Of course there were the seldom intelligent minds as I described, but many were pig headed athletes and such. One in particular had decided to stupidly pick a fight with John, and within seconds had lost. I had defined his fight as swift and quick as he had easily taken down the jerk without much vexing. I thought it to be quite funny that I had snapped a picture using my phone of the kid with a black eye and swollen lips.