how did we get here?

Ch. 1 (Therapy)

"At the beginning? Do you mean my parents? Well, my parents, let me tell you, are a weird beginning. My dad is Lucky Louie Jones, as the rock musician from the 70s when rock was cool. And my mom is a nurse.

It's one of those love stories straight from a movie, I swear. My dad hadn't settled down in his whole life, he was in his mid-thirties on the road with groupies and never with committed relationships. And my mom was too involved with her work for relationships. She is a nurse at a nursing home, so she deals with dying patients a lot, which really doesn't put you in a dating mood I'm sure. But my Nana Rosie, she changed all that. Nana wanted her son to have a traditional life and to meet a girl and get married. And my mom was Nana's nurse. Nana really liked my mom and got my dad to visit her because she told him she was dying. So Louis Jones stops his tour to visit his mama only to find out she was 'dying for him to meet this girl' and introduced Nurse Claire and Louis.

My dad would visit my Nana a lot more to see Claire, my mom. And they started dating after Nana egged and pushed them together all the time.

Nana Rosie got really sick and ended up passing away, and she put in her will she wanted her precious boy Louis to give his future wife the engagement ring she received from my Grandpa William., but only if he married that Claire Joseph girl. I mean, my Nana's dying wish was for my parents to get married! That's crazy, right? Anyway, my parents are stupidly in love, and they have me. My mom got ovarian cancer when I was really little, and she was saying how much she regretted now "living" before dying. She ended up getting a hysterectomy which made her cancer gone, and she quit her job so she could live her life. She followed my dad on tour and sang with him and they travel everywhere so my mom can see the things she never would have. They're idealists, and I admire it I guess but it can be smothering, too. I mean my mom quit a well-paying job to live in a van for crying out loud! And my dad never works, he just plays music and gets paid to do that. They love their lives.

I think my mom always wished she could have another kid. They didn't want to stop with me, but with my mom's ovarian cancer they had to. And I think that's why my parents coddle me so much: I was the only child they would ever have.

How does David come into it? Oh not until last year, well it'll be a year next month. Yeah, yeah it happened very fast. I didn't mean for it to come to what it did. That is, I wasn't trying to get pregnant at summer camp, and not with a stranger. We're kids, we don't intend on being kids with kids! I don't think I really knew it was going to be like this, though.

I have always been a huge band geek. I'm partial to the piano, though. My mom likes very classical music and my dad likes rock and jazz and that kind of stuff, and the piano can do both. I don't mean to sound like 'deep' or anything, either, but to be a blend of my parents' styles is kinda symbolic. And there's that thing where pianos are black and white, and my dad is black and my mom is white. I don't know, doc, I suppose that pianos just embody my soul. I know, cheesy yadda. I'm gonna double major English and Psych when I go to college in the fall, what'd you expect?

But I went to this really good summer camp from young musicians last year. Usually, I'm like a councilor for my local crappy music camp for little kids, but my parents finally let me go to a city for a whole 5 weeks to do this pre-college musicians camp!

So, it's my first day there and I'm just kinda wandering around. There's like one little green area in this whole urban wasteland, and there's one scrawny red-haired boy just sitting out there with his guitar. He's just zoning out on the first day. The first day! So I'm like, I have to find out this kid's MO. Why isn't he socializing with everyone else? He's just sitting under a tree with an acoustic guitar, I'm so interested in what he's up to.

I kinda stalked David for the first week, not gonna lie. He was so peculiar. He would make everyone laugh at like the morning meetings and he was super friendly, but around dinner time every SINGLE day, this kid would sit under the tree with his acoustic guitar and just go into his own little world.