Carry On

I : Student Dorms and Nice Roommates

The hardest part of a story, well... The hardest part to write, that is, is the beginning. For some strange reason, I find the beginning the hardest thing in the world to write. It's like the entire focus of the story, and sometimes the ending, is planned out, but I just can't get past the start. The easiest way to describe it right now, would be as though I were a five year-old child, incapable of going out without adult supervision, even though I wanted to go out and buy a taco or ice cream and eat it to my hearts content.

But let's just skip the introduction. Skip this entirely unnecessary phase in the story. What I want to do right now, is just dive right in without any diving equipment. I'll most probably die, but there's always this one percent chance that some mircale will happen and maybe I'll survive. Of course, there's always that other one percent, when a shark just so happens to pass by and eat me before I even get a chance to try and save myself, but that's not important.

So let's just zoom in. Its a huge world out there, and I could tell you a story about an orphan in South Africa, or a normal eleven year-old in Britain whose name is Harry, or one of those boring stories about a conspiracy or scandal that always seems to happen in America, but I wont. There's this one person who I want to tell you about now. Someone who wants to be remembered, someone who fears oblivion, just like Augustus Waters in The Fault In Our Stars.

Liza Hopkins.

She's pretty boring, really. Not very interesting. She's not someone like, say, Barack Obama, the one who jogs while practically oozing power. Nor is she David Cameron, or Liam Hemsworth, the one who can get someone to drool over him in an instant. Excluding the Gale haters.

But she's not all boring. I find her somewhat interesting. A girl who lives in her own world, the world she created, too afraid to venture out into the real one.

Thus, let us zoom in on her--Liza Hopkins.

~~

She stared. The tall, imposing, building seemed to stare right back at her.

She frowned. She must have looked like an idiot, standing in front of a student dormitory, with her multicoloured luggage right next to her.

It was overall a nice dorm, just quite out of the way. It took a fifteen minute walk just down the street to reach it from Kings Cross Station. Sure, there was a bus stop right across the street, but the only bus came every twenty minutes, making it rather useless unless she wanted to waste money to take a relaxing, two-minute trip down to the station. That alone would cost her three pounds. Such a waste.

But, even though it was relatively nice, more modern than the rest of the buildings she'd seen, it was just so... boring. Dull, unattractive, so... normal. She didn't like normal. She didn't like unineresting things. Painted stark white, with glass windows on every level, it was an unexciting retangular block which pretty much towered over the rest of the buildings.

Normalcy. Liza's lip curled. Just thinking about that word made her want to puke. She was adventurous, she was fun, but that was in her own world, the world where she could be anything without being judged, the world where she could decide the entire personality and fate of another.

In the real world? She was shy, withdrawn, and had difficulty accepting change. Change was bad, it was terrible. And that was exactly why she had been so reluctant to move away from the comforts of her home in a different, faraway country, to move over to metropolitan London. But she had a scholarship. She had a dream. She wanted this, yet she didn't want it at the same time. It was confusing, it was new, and it was hard to adapt to everything.

I only came here because it is my home country, she thought. It wasn't really a home country, though. Home was where you felt like you belonged. London wasn't home. Singapore hadn't been home either. She only had a Singaporean passport and a house there. There wasn't a home in Singapore, and there wasn't a home in London either. In fact, in London she didn't even have a house. She only had herself, money, her luggage and everything in it. Her hostel was just shelter from the winds, the rain and the heat.