Down In The Forest

Chapter One

"Baby, seasons change but people don't." the first line to a song that changed my life. This great, great quote that for me, at least, holds an extreme amount of both truth and lies. As I, Ashley Lockwood, have gone from an outgoing, obnoxious, over the top kid, to a depressed, introverted, and confused teenager over the course of three years.

I'm an artist. I take in everything I see and feel and throw it up into a sketch that most people would think came from a dying person. I'm overly emotional, and I take things too hard, just to fall apart. I cared too much, and some people thought I was crazy. But I wasn't... just very... expressive. My mom didn't appreciate them too much, as when she saw one of a gun shooting a heart, she was tempted to send me to therapy. I thought about death, a lot too.

It's not that I necessarily hated myself, I just hated the idea of growing up. I didn't want to die, but I didn't want to live the pointless, cookie-cutter life most people have. After all, we humans have only one, small, tiny life. And I wanted to spend mine, unlike most, living. Not simply existing. I wanted to sneak out at night just to lean against a tree under the stars with someone. I wanted to walk up and down train tracks for no reason. I wanted to have simple, good fun. Something that most people deem as nonsense with no purpose. But I was too afraid and weak, that's why I wanted to die...

I've always understood things. Like, not in the sense that I am a God, but I always understood things before most of my classmates. I got all A's throughout elementary school and was deemed "gifted" in second grade, along with my three best friends, Lily, Jamie, and Triston. By the time we reached the seventh grade, we were all taking high school classes. School suddenly became a hopeless, meaningless blob filled with X's, Y's, and stupid songs about the quadratic formula. Taking "early opportunity" classes like this meant that end-of-year finals were another thing for us to antagonize about school. Other than, of course, the bullies and popular girls that used so much makeup that they might as well have been the annoying orange. Girls who literally took time out of their morning to stuff their panties with washcloths just to have a guy stare at "their" 'butt'.

It's not like I didn't have any friends, I just only had a few that could tolerate me for long periods of time. I didn't like people, I was confused, a hopeless romantic, and, among my many, many flaws, I happened to be the gayest person on the planet. I couldn't figure out what was so great about men. They were terrible, really. But my friends didn't seem to mind, Jamie being asexual herself and Lily and Triston being together. We were all the same really, we liked the same bands, same YouTubers, and even shared the same ruthless sarcasm, so my sexuality was never really a problem. I didn't want to be with anyone. But nonetheless, I fell hard, harder than ever before, for the most beautiful girl in our school, Kya Wolfe. As it's impossible to explain the story in a few minutes and have you understand, I'll start from the beginning, the moment I first laid eyes on her, on the first day of eighth grade...