Holding Water in Your Hand

Introduction and First Memory

My name is Emily Michelle Weddle. But almost everyone I know calls me something sorter than that. Emmy, Em, Mimmy. I like them all. Emily makes me sound so old I think. Today it is October fifth of the year 2012. My eighteenth birthday is on the eighteenth, only thirteen days away. It's so close I can taste it. I'm five feet and eight inches tall and I have light brown eyes and shoulder length blonde hair that I've always wished would touch my waist, but it hasn't since I was probably five. I hacked it all off because my mom cut all of hers off. I looked like a little boy until I was probably eight or so. I hate having short hair.

I'm a writer. I hope to have a novel published in the future. I've already written three of them. I love to write. It's really an escape for me. If I'm upset I can sit down and write and soon I'll be so absorbed in what I'm writing that I won't even care about what's going on. My motivation behind this story was to tell the world about my life, because I know if I don't do it, someone else might try to and they might mess it up. So, I'm taking the project into my own hands. This is the story that led me to where I am right now, going on adulthood. And I'm here to share it with my readers and anyone who might be interested. I can tell you now that it won't be boring. I've had enough excitement in my life to write a book about. So, that's what I'm doing. The last thing I want is for someone to pity me. All I want is for whoever is reading this to understand what I've gone through to be who I am now. That's it.

So, here goes nothing . . .

The first thing I can remember was falling through the floor of my first home. I think I was three years old and my mom and my dad and I lived in this crappy trailer out behind the Armory in Beckley, West Virginia. I remember I woke up that morning and I was looking for mom. I saw these men working on the floor but I didn't know what they were doing, I was just a little kid. Then I remember all of the adults that were around started yelling at me and telling me to stop. I took another step and I fell through a big hole in the floor.

I remember looking up and seeing all of the men crowding around the hole in the floor and looking down at me. It was very dark under the trailer and I was scared. The panic on all the big people's faces scared me more than the dark did, though. I was a brave little kid. Tough as nails. Finally, the men reached through the hole and pulled me back up through the floor. I remember mom grabbed a hold of me and she held me for I don't know how long. I asked her about it not too long ago and she told me I was lucky that I didn't hit one of the axels. The trailer had wheels and if I would have hit one of those axels, I probably would have been paralyzed from the hips down. But that didn't happen. So, I'm here.