Eyes on You // Awsten Knight

two

I had received many injuries from the crash. I would have back problems for years to come, and my left hand never really worked the same again. It was always stiff. The man who hit me was charged for leaving the scene of the car accident, and ended up spending a year and a half in prison. They never did bust him for the impaired driving.

The worst think to come out of the whole ordeal was the brain trauma. Seizures had become a frequent part of my life, and would occur up to three times a weak for the next two years. With the help of medication and treatment, they became less common, but they would always be there. I was taken out of public school so that my mother could always monitor my condition. I hated this. I missed my friends and my classmates. I missed getting into fights during recess, and having to sit in the office. Now, I had a private tutor who came around for two hours a day to teach me out of a book. The rest of my time spent at home was miserable. I wasn't allowed outside unless accompanied by an adult, and I couldn't have a door to my room. Everything I did was watched over carefully because of my seizures, and it caused me to hate the world. I was so lonely despite having people around me at all times. But as time carried on, and I grew older, the seizures became less and less frequent. At the age of twelve, I was given a bracelet that would let my parents know if I was going into a seizure when they weren't around. They gave me my door back, and that was the first time in years I was granted privacy.

Solitude became bearable. At the time, Facebook, Myspace and Tumblr were at their peak, and I created my first social media account. Ever since the coma, and what had happened inside my brain within the coma, I had turned to poetry. I went under the alias 'ManicKat,' and I began to share my work with the online world.

I had never forgot about the strange man in my coma-induced dream. To this day, nobody has ever called me Kat. It was always just Kathy. There was something about the name Kat that just had so much more force to it. Kathy took care of horses and had a gluten allergy. Kat snuck out at night to tag buildings and listen to punk music in abandoned warehouses.

I loved the name Kat and the concept it fronted, but I was almost too scared to use it. I wasn't rebellious, but I craved that lifestyle with all my heart. Social media exposed me to music, and a new era of my life began. I would make my mom pick up Alternative Press or Rocksound magazines from the mall whenever we went clothes shopping, and posters began to cover the white walls of my room. It started with standard bands like The Beatles or Green Day, but branched off into My Chemical Romance, The Killers, Joy Division and Sum 41. My mom, much to my fathers objections, had even let me dye the tips of my hair pink with Kool Aid powder. 'ManicKat' had gained popularity as a Tumblr blog, and it became my source for art, music and my "troubled life." When I was thirteen, I started to beg my parents to let me go back to public school. I wanted real life friends, as I really didn't have any. I wanted to understand why all the kids online complained about school so much. I wanted a new start.

After a whole year of begging and crying and doctors appointments, my mom and dad decided that it would be best for me to be exposed to more social conditions. My teenage angst had started to consume me. My poetry had turned to songwriting, and my mother even gifted me my first acoustic guitar. These were about to be the most formative years of my life. I took to posting covers on my YouTube channel and my MySpace page, and quickly gained a small following.

By the time school was about to start, I had let the concept of the depressed teen consume me. It was my first day of high school after not attending school for years. The school I was about to attend was filled with people who I knew before the accident, and I wondered if they'd remember me from all those years ago. I almost hoped that they would. Nobody had really heard of me since the coma. Three days before school started, my dad had told me that the pink I kept putting in my hair was ugly. He raved on about how hair dye was meant for old ladies who couldn't accept the fact that they've aged. That evening, I took my bike down to the convenience store and bought a box of jet black hair dye. I threw it into the basket on the front of my beach bike, and rushed back to my house.