What I Left Behind (boyxboy)

In The Beginning...

After the move from my childhood home, things were amazing. I guess you could call it culture shock. The house we had moved into was a old New England cottage. It had beautiful original woodwork throughout, imperfect hardwood floors, a tiny little kitchen. The main feature of the house seemed to be everyone's favorite, the front porch. This room had all the action. It was covered and glassed in with storm windows, and slightly hidden by what my mother would call her "privacy bushes".

Where I grew up in, the log cabin, the house was set back maybe 500 feet from the road. It was always silent. The road where the house sat was also quiet, albiet being one of the main thoroughfares across town, you hardly had to look when crossing the street. It was the definition of a quiet street.

Now at the new house? This was a busy street. It was fascinating to me in the beginning. I would sit on the porch all day and admire the people who walked by, some were walking dogs, some were just out for a stroll. Right down the street was Holy Name Hospital. We were on the main road to get there. The ambulances that would be screaming down the street, weaving through traffic was one of the most shocking things to me. It seemed there was a ambulance siren going by constantly.

Within the first few weeks of being a city resident I even took the city bus. This was a new one for me. Even though I had a perfectly running and driving car which I adored. I just had to try it out. I took the bus the terminal, switched over to the 9 bus which ran though downtown, took it all the way to the end and then went back to the terminal and took 11 bus back home. I was really starting to see how great things in this new city really were.

I felt free from my past which haunted me ever since I graduated high school.

Nick Nolan

The school therapist who I saw briefly always told me I had to turn over a new page, and for the first time I finally felt like this was happening.

Six months before I moved into the city my parents got divorced. It wasn't too much of a shock to me or my older sister Ally. For the past few years things were getting really bad between them. It all started when my father took off his wedding ring one day while changing the oil in his car, he never put it back on, and it stayed on the shelf in the kitchen up until the day when we moved out. My mother was heartbroken in the beginning, but like myself was turning over her own leaf and starting a new life for herself too. She was a full time dispatcher for an local ambulance company. My father worked hard too, running what was formerly his fathers paint shop an hour away in Boston. When he finally decided to formally divorce my mother he packed a few bags and went up to live closer to his work. My father and myself were never that close, I'd get the phone call every friday asking his cliche line "Hows's Flynn on this fabulous friday?". Tacky.

My sister was three years older than me and had moved out of state with her boyfriend after she landed a job at the same place as him. They met while he was down visiting family, they were at the restaurant where we both worked, and within six months of dating long distance. She quit her bartending job and moved four hours north to be with him. I was happy for her to finally find somebody, but it left the weight of the divorce on my shoulders. She would call my mother every few days to check in on her while the divorce was still fresh, but there is only so much you can do from almost 300 miles away.