POV- Francesca DiVita
I've always been an outsider. It's difficult when you're constantly moving around and nobody really has a chance to get to know you. My parents got divorced when I was in 5th grade and since then I've been back and forth. First it was between houses, then my mom moved away from our busy city of Miami to a newer type of busy: New York City. I stayed with my mom until 5th grade but after a long debate, it became clear the city wasn't for us. My mother tried to get her life together and figure out what she wanted while I was tossed back to my father in Miami, but this time in a new part where I knew nobody. In this new house I didn't even feel like I knew my father anymore; it was all about his new girlfriend who in my opinion just wanted his money.
It became clear at some point in living with my father that the divorce was too much for him and the only reason he stayed with his girlfriend, Diana, was so he could forget about the life he left behind when him and my mother broke ties. He never told me this, but I could see it in his eyes when he looked my way; when he told me I looked and acted just like my mother. It took a while, but eventually I realized that hadn't been the lovely compliment it used to be to him. Now it meant something else and all I became was the stupid reminder he dreaded of his past life as he desperately tried to mold a new one. I was making it harder for him and I hated feeling like a road block.
Though all my father saw in my mother was hatred and abandonment, I've always noticed her intelligence and her spark of determination to find the best life she could. Once she worked out all of the affairs, she landed a comfortable business job in a subtle town called Long Valley, New Jersey where I will be living a new life with her. In her reign to start this new life, I feel like I have a new chance to be more than a dreaded face and harsh memory. To have friends I could stay with and not fear creating attachments to. I don't want to be an outsider anymore and now I have that chance.
