Those Who Stare Into the Sun

Chapter One: A new beginning

It all actually started with my dad falling into depression, as his father had done before him. Apparently we inherited a gene, where social phobia and thoughts of chaos followed. My dad had always been overly worried and scared about all sorts of things. This had affected me and my sister in the way that we didn't get to do much growing up. Along with this, mum and dad had always been quite poor when we were little, so we never took any trips abroad, for example. That, and it always reqired a lot of nagging when we wanted to attend parties and such. He and my mother always denied us, until they no longer could stand our screams of anger.

But I think this depression-thing skipped over me. My sister had it for sure. She clearly had a problem with social phobia, and she always saw the worst in people and their intentions. But I had always been quite the opposite. I preffered to see the positive things in life, and the older I got, the more I learned to appreciate the small things.

You know: birds singing, long walks with a cup of coffee, and I also had the capability to enjoy my own company quite alot. I also wanted to travel (but never really got to it), and enjoyed living in larger cities with a lot of people and things to do. My aim in life had never been to get married and have children, which my sister thought quite odd. She got engaged to her first boyfriend and by the age of twenty-four they had a house, two cars and a dog. Some years later they had my niece. I, on the other hand, spent my early twenties dating around and trying to figure out what I wanted in life. I never seemed to get satisfied no matter what I did. I always wanted more. After a while I was sort of jealous of my sister, who was pleased with beeing settled.

Anyway, some months ago my mum got ill and died. Not many months after that my dad killed himself.

He had always said that he didn't want to go through life without my mother in it. Even if they had made each other miserable most of the time. That's love for some people, I guess.

I felt empty for a long time after that, of course. I never knew that I could have such darks thoughts at times. But after both funerals were through and I started to feel okey again, another part of me awoke. Their death had been king of an awakening for me, in the form of that I got reassurence that they hadn't gone through life the right way. Not that I knew how to do that, but at least now I knew that you sort of had to take chanses and actually aspire to be happy to achieve it. Not staying in the same small town that you were born in, and thinking that life was a glass half empty. And so I ended things with the man I lived with.

We had lived in Stockholm for some years, and I had studied and gotten a degree as an optician. I liked the profession, but my thoughts always took me to my dreams of becoming a director. I loved movies. Motion picture. Growing up I of course wanted to become an actor, but most of us grow out of those unattainable dreams.

Little did I know that it would be just the thing I was to do within a year later.