Retrospection: An autobiography

Pre-Preface:

I'm an idiot. I honestly believed in all this crap when I wrote it. I believed I'd found my soulmate and that we would be together forever and ever and ever. Well guess what. It turns it, it wasn't real. Wednesday, October 24th, 2007, he left me. He told me he woke up one morning and realized he didn't love me anymore. Just like that. Overnight. No reason. He told me what an amazing person I am and that he knows he's making a huge mistake. I'm still the best friend he's ever had, and he's still insanely attracted to me. But the love is missing and he says he doesn't know why.

Bullshit.

Anyway, here you go. This is me when I believed in love and good times and happiness. I'm not that person anymore.

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Okay, if there's actually anybody out there who lurks through my portfolio and reads whatever they can find - God forbid you call yourself a fan - then I know. I know, I know, I know. You're probably sick to death of listening to me rant on and on about life and love in a hectic, nonstructured kind of style that doesn't really make much sense.

But, hey. This is me, it's the Undiagnosed-A.D.H.D. way my mind works. Look, I haven't even started yet and I'm already rambling.

The unabridged, unedited, uncensored... Me.

Okay.

It's probably the oldest of clichés that love can change a person, right? Love makes the world go 'round, love is all you need. Blah blah love this, blah blah love that. I'll be honest, there was a time when I didn't believe in anything akin to true love... Alright, that's not altogether true. What I believed was that it existed somewhere over the rainbow, that only the luckiest, most blessed of people who weren't me would find it and live happily ever after.

Funny how hindsight is 20/20. It's not until you stop and look back on things that you realize it wasn't normal. Not normal to have to grow up the way I did, to have to live without the things I did. Not normal to have to feel the way I did. Even as a child, I can't remember ever being happy. The way I've put it in conversations with my closest friend is that I'd had fleeting moments of joy in my life, but fleeting they were. There was never really any prolonged state of happiness, even in the calm moments between torrents of storm.

It all began the way these things usually do. A typical teenage girl moves in with her three-years-older boytoy, to the strongest of objections and forewarnings of her English-Immigrant parents. Teenage girl becomes pregnant, drops out of high school a semester before graduation. Young couple have baby, get married.

It's hardly the makings of a Fairy Tale.

Skip ahead a year and tell me what you expect. Roses, smiles, walks in the park holding hands? Life is not like the movies. When people ask me what my earliest memory is, I lie. I tell them, it was my first trip to England with my mom, when my cousin kept stealing my new pink tricycle. Or when I saw a dead crab down in the harbor in Cornwall. Or the time I lost my favourite stuffed animal and my family arranged an elaborate lie to replace him and make me think it was the same one.

But the truth isn't quite so innocent and sweet.

My earliest memory is one of crying under a table in the living room as my father choked my mother in another room the kitchen/dining area. I remember him storming out, I remember remaining under said table as my mother then phoned her parents to come get us, and then yet another subsequent night in her old room.

It wasn't long until they were divorced. Give it a couple of years from my birth, it wasn't all that long. But, it was more than long enough. Mom and I went to live with my grandparents and teenage aunt. Life went on. It was a down period. But, it was the beginning of yet another downward spiral.

See, my dad, he had a boss. And this boss was a man that my mom hated, couldn't stand for the entire time they were together. She used to avoid him whenever she visited my dad at work. She despised him. But heartbreak can change a person, the same way love can. But, for the worse.

Despite what had gone wrong - regardless of how predictable a fact it was that it would go wrong at all - she loved my father. And more recent conversations with grandparents suggest that this is the reason life turned out the way it did. I suppose in a sense you could say, I ruined my mother's life. But, let's not, because these days I'd much rather live than turn back time and, well, not. So, she was devastated when they finally decided it was time to go their separate ways. She was vulnerable, afraid to be alone. And the first person who 'cared' (and I use the term loosely), who got in and comforted her... Well, she fell for him, I guess. In her own rebound-girl kind of way.

Them's the things what history are made of... As they say.

Skip ahead, a few years and two more children later... Honestly, you would think that I'd be able to pick out one thing that was fantabulous about my childhood. But looking back now, try as I might, I'm seeing only a lot of bad and no place to start explaining it. There was never a time when I can't remember being shouted and screamed at like I'd just burned the house down by playing with matches and hundred dollar bills. It's hard to feel like you're wanted when every day you're being told that you're not.

I won't even attempt to deny the fact that I'm very bitter about the way I grew up, because there's no point in trying to mask it.

I remember, in the house we lived in before the address at which my mom and her family currently reside, the same old thing. Yelling, shouting, screaming, slapping, hitting, so on. And just to put things in perspective, we moved into that house when I was four or so, and we moved out of that house when I was six. At the time, my little sister was only a couple years old, my brother was just born. In honesty I don't have a whole lot of memories of living there aside from that, except when my aunt lived with us for a while, the puppy my mom got me for my fifth birthday and who was stolen after less than two weeks. The kitten my aunt bought. The fireplace. Having to nail the Christmas Tree to the ceiling so it wouldn't fall over. Stepping over pine needles. My friend eating mud in the back yard and telling me it tasted like chocolate.

Things were more or less the same, the same yelling, the same kind of Hitler's-guide-to-parenting. Skip ahead a couple of years.

It's in the next house that most of my memories were made. Like the old place, I had to share a bedroom with my younger sister, and I remember singing her to sleep at night, for years and years. I even remember fondly that I used to have this Barbie doll that she thought for a couple of years was a fairy or guardian angel of sorts. See, we had bunk beds, I was on the bottom, and I used to stick the doll up between the bed and the wall at night, and my sister would talk to her. She used to ask her questions about life, talk about the things that were troubling her, and even ramble on about inane stuff that nobody else had the patience for. Love her to bits, but my sister's always been something of a chatterbox, with an attention span that means she jumps topics randomly a lot.

I suppose to her, this doll was more than just the doll that it was to me. She used to really talk to it, and for a while I guess she considered it a friend. To her, she was real, and she was the only 'person' she could really talk to. Don't get me wrong, my sister has always - and still does - talk to me about her problems and what's going on in her life. But there are always some things that people don't feel comfortable saying to anyone else. The doll was her outlet for these things. She used to have me sing to her until she thought I was asleep, then she'd talk to this doll until she herself finally dozed off. Sometimes she'd make the stupid doll sing her sleep too.

Really, as much of a pain as she was sometimes, my sister was an adorable kid.

I remember my brother used to come into the room and have me sing to him as well, and on Christmases we would all cram together in our room to chat all night and try in vain to fall asleep.

But, we never really did anything as a family. The only time we ate at the table together was Christmas, Easter, Thanksgiving and things like that, and even then it tapered off by the time I was in High School. I don't remember ever going to the nearby amusement park as a family, or for a day to the Zoo. The thing is, my mom used to do these things with me, used to read me a book before bed, and do all those kinds of motherly things. But once she got with her current husband, the family situation was just... not.

My entire life, although he was a presence from the time that I was two years old or so, I never called my stepfather "dad". Okay, I lie. One year, when I was only about six or seven, I decided I would try it just because it would make my mom happy and maybe would get him to lighten up on me a little bit. It was Father's Day, I gave him his card, and said "Happy Father's Day.. Dad". And he did his usual thing. He ignored it, and shouted at me over something my brother and sister were doing, which in those days was probably nothing at all. He used to look for reasons to shout and hit and make threats and tell us we were stupid. This was just another day. I tried. I made an effort to get past my boundaries, and he did that. I shouldn't have been surprised. But I never called him my father once more after that day, and I never will until the day that I die. He doesn't deserve the privilege.

On that note, this is kind of an aside, but I find it moderately amusing that to this day he believes he's going to be the one to give me away at my wedding.

But moving on.

My mom went back to work full time after having my brother, started working Fast Food at the nearby shopping mall food court. Since her husband worked full time, it was always up to me to take care of my brother and sister. We only had a babysitter up until the time that I was sevenish, after that it was all on me. I had to be me, a child, a daughter, a sister, and also a replacement parent. As the years progressed, my brother and sister became more and more my responsability. And if my mother's husband came home from work and x or y had happened, it was my fault.

It seemed it was always my fault. Maybe it's because of his own negative feelings toward me. Maybe it's because of his asshole nature and the previously mentioned fact that he would search for reasons to shout at us. But if my brother or my sister was in trouble, I would always, always get dragged into it. And if there was an argument between myself and one of my siblings, he unfailingly sided with the other.

My family situation has always been such that I felt a bit like the outsider. I still see it this way: my mother has her family. Wife, husband, two children. And then there's me, on the outside, the reminder of her old life, her past mistakes. I'm not his, I never made any effort to pretend to be, and maybe he despises me for that fact. That he can't look at any of my accomplishments and claim to have been a supportive cause for it. I don't know. All I know is that I am the outsider of my own family.

Since starting school, things just increased more on the tension-drama-sadness scale. There was always the shouting, the threats, the "what are you, stupid?", the put-downs, the everything. But things started to intensify.

On the weekends, my grandparents would take us when my parents were at work. Not only so I didn't have to babysit, but because they liked seeing us, and we liked seeing them. There was hardly a Friday or Saturday night that I didn't spend there or at my best friend's house. But they moved back to England by the time I was around ten, so this is the timeframe I speak of now. By this point, I was terrified of my mother's husband, and would tremble and shake and cry and sob uncontrollably to the point that I couldn't talk at all and felt like I would pass out. It's a wonder I didn't have a nervous breakdown by the time I reached puberty.

One of his favourite things to do then, and increasingly since I might add, was to threaten to kick us out. Not kick us out, but to pack our bags, call Social Services or Child Welfare or whatever other agency, and give us away. He didn't want us, and he made that clear. I remember one day in particular very vividly. It was a Saturday, mom had started work in the morning and he had to leave at 4:30 to get to his weekend job delivering pizza. Mom wouldn't be home until the evening so we were off to my grandparents' house, which was only a couple of blocks away from where we lived. Before that, he was on a tirade.

I don't remember what about, probably because our bedrooms weren't clean. I also need to say that this was a very sore spot for me. Sharing a room with my sister, if it wasn't clean, it was both our fault. I would divide the room in half, tell her to do one and I would do the other, but she invariably refused and I either wound up doing it all, or did my half and left hers so she would have to deal with the consequences.

More often than not though, caring sap that I am, I just did it all so she wouldn't get into trouble. That's probably why she refused in the first place.

But this day in particular, I suppose I hadn't, maybe I hadn't had time, or.. whatever. Regardless of why, the rooms weren't spotless and my mother's husband was... the phrase "apeshit" is the first to come to mind. He ushered us downstairs, screaming all the while about what crap children we were, how much he didn't want us, how he was going to give us away. I, of course, was worked up into a state, which got worse when he turned and forcefully punched the wall by the downstairs half-bath. The next words out of his mouse, following a series of expletives, were "Now look what you did, you made me break my F-ing hand!".

This was just a singular example of the way he was. It probably doesn't help matters that he's a chronic alcoholic and habitual "soft drug" user. As I said, things just got worse over the years.

Skipping back a little, when I was six years old, we were on a company barbeque picnic deal with his weekend job workmates. There was a park nearby, with a very tall slide. I fell off the top, and landed on my head, succeeding in fracturing my skull. The fracture wasn't caught on initial X-Rays and when they finally did see it, they just left it. This may or may not have contributed to the severity of the migraines I've suffered since. My mom and aunt and grandmother and great-grandmother et cetera, all suffered from it, so in my case, migraine headaches were always a hereditary thing. Surely, though, this was the trigger to make them come on strong, and often. And they only got worse growing up, undoubtedly due to an insane amount of stress.

Because of this, and the fact that I was a sick-ish youngster anyway, I missed quite a bit of school. And even on days when I had a particularly bad migraine and couldn't think straight, or be in a room with a window or television set, he used to drag me out of my bedroom and make me do work around the house. If I wasn't at school, I had to be doing something at home. Dishes, tidying, vacuuming. Anything he could find, while he sat in front of the television with another beer in his hand.

I hated him for this. I hated him for much much more. I realize that hate is probably the strongest but most overused word in the world next to "Love". People use it when they don't mean it. Or they use it out of context, or maybe don't know what it means. It kind of cheapens the value when every other sentence out of a person's mouth is "Oh my god I LOVE this song!!!" or "Dude, I hate that dork in English class, he thinks he's all that". It's not hate, it's not love. It's like, it's dislike.

But in my case, the words are true to their origins. To me, the word hate isn't strong enough to describe the fiery passion with which I despise my mother's husband. Growing up, there was never more than a day that went by during which he didn't flip out over this or that, or make me cry. Or make me wish I wasn't born.

Things only got worse when my aunt and then grandparents moved back to England.

My entire life, they were always there for me. I spoke to them every day, saw them at the very least twice a week, usually more. I don't blame them for their decisions; for them it was the right thing to do, and long past time that they should have done it, for many reasons. But at the time, it was a case of taking away the people closest to me, people I needed. They kept me grounded, they were the people who loved me and whom I could talk to. My aunt in particular has always been my best friend, and my grandmother was always my childhood confidant. My safe haven had always been at their house. And then suddenly, they were gone.

And I was alone.

My mother. Bless her and all that, I adore her, but she's always been unreliable. The kind of woman who will make a promise to her children to get them to back off. Or probably more correctly, the kind of woman who will make a promise of pure intention, although somewhere inside she never really intends to keep it. Growing up, when her husband went off on one, she would just stay out of it. If she stepped in, he turned it on her. So usually she just stayed out, let him get on with it, and then try to calm him down later.

There were a few incidents in which she defended us though, told him to calm down and stop screaming, whatever. But that unfailingly led to a fullscale fight between the two of them, usually resulting in him storming out, saying he was leaving and not coming back, and mom crying in her bedroom. On some level, she probably blamed us for her marital issues. And with the handful that my brother and sister are these days, she probably still does.

Skipping ahead a couple of years. Entering Junior High School, sans my grandparents and aunt. This is when things got worse in my life. And yes, there is a worse, believe it or not.

After the fact it became clear that it was my grandparents who really provided for us. My stepdad paid the bills, my mom bought food and stuff. But after they left, I don't remember having anything. It was my best guyfriend's mom who bought me my first bra, and an outfit when she saw I had to wear the same sweatpants and hoodie every day. I don't think I owned a pair of pyjamas. My shoes were always either too small or too big because they were hand-me-downs. My socks always had holes in them. There was even a point when all clothing was thrown into the weekly wash on a Sunday together and afterward I would have to scramble to get mind out or else my sister would get my underwear.

I stopped caring about myself. I had nothing, I had been pushed down to the point where I believed that I was nothing. I hated the way I looked. I hated my life. I hated my personality. I just hated everything about everything. I stopped trying in school, went from a Gold-honors student my first semester of Seventh Grade to a Silver-honors student the remainder of the year. Then from Silver to none in Eighth. Like I said, I stopped caring. I didn't feel the need or the urge to make something of my life anymore. I was convinced that, one way or another, I would die young.

And God, did I want to die.

Starting in 7th grade, it got so that all I did was wake up, go to school, come home, go to my room. I would put on my radio, and go to sleep. Usually it was a matter of putting on the radio, listening to my recorded tapes of music over and over again, and just... it's kind of hard to explain. I would get myself into a state of consciousness that wasn't quite awake but wasn't exactly asleep either. Since then, from things I've read, I think it was some form of guided hypnosis, or lucid dreaming. Regardless of the mechanics of it, what I did was basically listen to my music and escape into fantasies of what my life could be, being some other person somewhere else, in an alternate reality. Often I would take things like my favourite movies and work myself into the plot and imagine that that was my life.

Then I would get up to eat, do homework and watch TV in my room for an hour or two, and go back to sleep. All I wanted to do was sleep; dreaming was my escape from reality. The dreamworld was far more preferable to the life I was leading. I could disappear and pretend that things weren't the way they were.

Things more or less continued on the same path for the entire first two years of my Junior-High experience. And things with my mother's husband were still getting worse. His new job was in shifts. He would work two weeks of nights, getting home around three or four, and then two weeks working days 6am until 3pm. His weekend job meant that on Saturdays he didn't get home until around 3, and Sundays usually meant one or so.

I remember being woken up more nights than not when he got home from work. On more than one occasion he came and woke me up to yell at me before he went to bed. Not once did my mom ever say or do anything.

I think it was somewhere around Eighth grade that my mom moved my bedroom to the basement. And then, the waking up in the middle of the night was worse, because I could hear the front door opening, his stomping footsteps. I could hear above me far more clearly than I had ever been able to hear below me. It seemed that every night he would come home from work and start throwing things around, clattering stuff together in the kitchen. It's really no wonder that I was an insomniac.

And when my grades weren't fantastic, I got it more. He dropped out of school in the 9th grade, my mom didn't graduate either. My brother and sister didn't do well in school but that didn't cause any grief to anyone. However, if I got less than an 80% as an overall average, it was Hell. There's a reason I stopped showing him my report card.

During 9th grade, I rekindled the relationship I had with my on-again-off-again good friend named J, although she had pretty much been replaced the previous year by V, who still remians my best girl-friend. But in 9th grade, I tried to pull myself out of my depression. I started trying in school - although halfheartedly - and pulled an inconsistent 60-80 average. I spent hours after school hanging out with she and a guy who was new to our homeroom that year, N, which became our little Threesome. Weekends were almost all spent staying at V's house. I think the so-called popular girls felt sorry for me, because they started talking to me and defending me if some idiot did or said the wrong thing.

But I still wasn't happy, and the home situation was always just as bad, and was always there when I got back. I couldn't escape, and for an extended timeframe, I seriously considered ending it. What stopped me though, is my stupid undying empathy. I hated me, I hated my life, I didn't want to live it anymore. But I had also lived through it, been very close to somebody who was suicidal to the point of hospitalization for many years. I knew what it was like, and I couldn't do that to the few people who actually cared about me.

This is about the time my mom stopped shopping at all. School supplies, we had to find whatever stationery we had around the house and take that. Shoes, tough. Clothes, it got to the point where I had to use all my babysitting money just so that I'd have two pairs of pants and a few tee-shirts so I wouldn't look like a grunge all the time. And this is about the time the teasing finally stopped. I never told my family about it, but it was bad for about a year and a half. It still surprises me that my friends stuck by me through it, because there were a few individuals who really made my school-life bad at the time. I didn't want to be at home because of the shouting, the insults, the screaming, the threats. I didn't want to be at school because of the teasing, the ridicule, the laughing at me.

Enter High School.

I'd made a conscious effort to try and.. well, start over. I still didn't have a lot of clothing or whatever, but I had enough to get by because I'd bought it. I started wearing a little makeup - which over the course of highschool came to a habitual state in which I'm unable to leave the house without at least a coat of Mascara on. I still remember, my first day at my high school, we didn't have classes. We had to go in to get photos taken for our ID cards, pay school fees, acquaint ourselves with the place itself, meet a couple of teachers, get our timetables. And at one point V and I walked down one of the upstairs halls, and the prime instigator of all the teasing, the one who started it and then got the others in on the game, the one who had made my life Hell for two years... He said hi to me. Hey, what's up, and a smile. And his friends said hi. I responded, I walked away.

I was surprised.

As it turned out, he was in my TA (Err, homeroom equivalent if you're not familiar with the term). I talked to him on and off, never really forged a friendship, but he was nice to me, he was civil, he didn't really bother anyone. I've forgiven him for the hell that was my Junior-High experience, and he's the only one of the bunch who has been given that.

V and I were as close as sisters at that point. It even turned out that we had the exact same schedule for the year, except our Math-Pure-10 classes were in different rooms. So we had all but one class together. We were the top of our classes - I was actually the number one in our Computer class and she was second by about 2 percentage points.

I actually did enjoy that year to some extent. The home situation was the same, if not worse. My mom stopped doing weekely grocery shopping, so it was a matter of going out after work/school to get food for that night. Breakfast was unheard of, and after the first year or so she stopped giving me lunch money either, so I was on one meal a day.

But school was going well, and in a sense that was my escape.

V and I forged a close friendship with another girl from our phys-ed and English classes early in the year, and by Christmas the three of us were inseparable. We spent all of our time together. I spent every weekend at one or the others' house. M and I started going to the movies at least once a week.. it was like a tradition. It was good. Even being forced into Choral class when my art class was full in the second term turned out to be good. I really wound up enjoying it, and gained a little bit of confidence back when I sang alone and was told I have talent.

I won an award that year for having such high grades, I still have it... a bronze P medal (P for the name of my school). If I'd gotten them the subsequent two years it would have been Silver and then Gold for having it three years consecutively.

Unfortunately, after tenth grade, things plummeted again.

Megan stopped being a part of our group but V and I were still close. The home situation was worse though, and at one point my stepdad walked out and took my mom's credit cards and bank card, effectively leaving us with absolutely nothing for a couple of days as, like I said, food shopping was done on a day-to-day basis. I hoped he wouldn't come back, but he did.

I think it was also that year that he was charged with beating on my little brother.

The story goes that my brother was at his friend's house and refused to come home. I was at work with my mom as I often did when she was working nights and he was working days, so I wouldn't have to be alone with him and deal with his abuse. To this day I don't think she realizes what he was like when she wasn't around. He yelled more, screamed more (although by 9th grade or so he mostly stopped the hitting, and hadn't hit me since), threatened more. But he also bitched about my mother to the Nth degree. It was her this, her that, her fault this, her fault that, she did this she did that. Everything was on my mom and us, and he was just the perfect happy little center of the universe.

This particular day, though, when he picked us up at 9:15 that night, we knew immediately he was in a mood. Mom and I got into the car, mom said "Hey, hon" in her usual way, and he ignored her, and took off speeding home. His agitation and anger was apparent. Mom asked what was up, and he turned on me.

"You are not to go out anymore, you are to stay home and clean up there. You are grounded until further notice" and more yelled and calling me stupid and et cetera. Of course, I had no idea what the hell I had done, so when we got home, I went to my room and cried myself to sleep.

It was a few days later when the lady from Social Services showed up at the house. My brother answered the door, she told him she needed to come in and have a look around and talk to us, and he let her in. I was confused. She looked around the messy house, in the cupboards and fridge, the pile of dishes that I'd just put in the sink to wash. Then took my brother and sister upstairs separately in their rooms to talk to them alone.

I called my mom, and she called her husband and then came home.

Then the lady came and talked to me... I can't remember what she said, I think she just wanted to see my room. Which in honesty, was the cleanest in the house. Next thing I knew, the police were there and we were informed that there was a complaint made about physical child abuse.

I was shocked.

As it turns out, after my brother wouldn't come home from his friend's house, my mother's husband drove there, dragged him into the car. Once in the car, he hit him with his fists. Once home, he his hit more with his fists, then took off his belt and hit my brother with that. Hard, until the leather snapped in half and the buckle went flying across the entryway.

Then apparently he picked up the hockey stick in the corner and hit him with that.

I still can't believe the insane way he reacted. My brother refused to come home, so his father beat on him with a belt and a hockey stick. This is an aside, but I also remember a time when he was yelling at my brother and picked him up by the throat and threw him on the couch, screaming something about "little F--king c**ksucker!". This was shortly after the rest of it I think, but I don't remember the precise timeframe.

Anyway, a police report was filed, statements taken by both my brother and sister. My mom was in tears, looking at her husband with an accusing glare. Apparently my sister couldn't deal with it and told her counsellor at school about it, who in turn called Child Welfare who in turn called the police. If I'd known what had happened I'd have done it myself, but my poor sister to this day feels guilty and like she's ruined the family environment by saying something, like the rest of it is all her fault. But she doesn't see that it was broken from the beginning and things would have been a lot worse had she not said anything. All of us still would be ignorant and he would probably be hitting even more now.

He was given a suspended sentence for a year. It was also decided that he either had to do community service or pay a fine. I think he took the fine although he bitched about it all as if the judge was a manhating witch and it was all her fault. He and mom had to go to parenting classes, my brother and sister had to go to... I think it was anger management or counseling of some other sort. My stepdad was sentenced to anger management as well, but he didn't go for a single day.

Essentially, he got away with it.

We got yelled at even more then because of what was happening. And then he would do the crying shtick. The summer after this happened, which was only a few months later, my aunts were visiting from England and he was going on about it to them as well. My mom never told my aunt the whole story, and told me not to. But I did. She deserved to know.

He cried, saying "If anybody else tells me I'm a bad father and did the wrong thing, I don't know what I'll do". He honestly thought he was in the right.

Then that summer he also got into a tiff with my sister, she talked back, and he said either she would have to leave or he would. She wound up spending a night or two at the lady's house across the alleyway from us, after my stepdad's sister decided she didn't want my sister either and suggested instead that she go stay at a home for runaways and the like downtown. In which they slept there, and were kicked out at 8am to go fend for themselves for the rest of the day.

I hate his entire family, incidentally, although not to quite the same extent as he himself.

Tension ever since has been a lot higher. It's always a case of walking on eggshells and watching what you say, because one wrong move, one wrong glance, a single wrong word, and he flips out. And it's still the same. My depression that year got worse again. All I did was eat and sleep and go to school, and as a result, I gained weight. I went from an almost-chubby-but-almost-had-a-six-pack-tummy 130lbs to 180lbs, in six months. That is what we like to call unhealthy. The next year, I packed on even more weight, but have been losing it slowly for the past couple of years. I'm not as uncomfortable in my own skin anymore, but I still dislike the way I look about 60% of the time. The weight gain really contributed to my depression at the time as well.

Things were exactly the same with no change up until July 2004. I graduated from high school. I got my yearbook, had people sign it. And a week later I was on a plane to Manchester.

I just couldn't live in that situation anymore, I refused to. The original plan had been to go to the local university with my V for two years, then spend another three or so at the provincial U to get our degrees. But I didn't want to do that. I didn't want to stay there in crapsville, Canada. I didn't want to be a damned Pharmacist.

So, the decision was made kind of.. licketty-split, you could say. I thought about it for a day and then decided to come. Which was the right decision. I've been to England numerous times since Childhood, my mom and all her family are from here, I've always loved it here. And I really really needed to be able to start over fresh and get away from everything that had been my life up until that point. Eighteen years and nothing but tears to show for it.

Enter England.

I moved in with my grandparents but spent every other week or so at my aunts' place. Still depressed. I spent a lot of time on the internet. Really, it's all I did. I had more then than I've ever had in my life before then. Clothes, outfits, material things. But also love of a family.

I was so timid, so shy, so introverted. I remember when I first got here, my aunts took me to a nightclub that is a mix of straight people and gays. My aunt's friend John asked me to dance, and I didn't want to. He pushed, and I actually wound up in tears. I had an inability to deal with anything like that. Maybe I still do, but that remains to be seen.

December of 2004, my grandparents and I got a rental house in the same city as my aunt, the city I planned to go to university, the city my grandfather grew up in. We started inquiring about university, and I was told that I'd either have to live here for three years before going or else I'd have to pay double tuition for being classed as an overseas student.

From late January to late March 2005, I went back to Canada for two months. And... it was not a nice time. I mean, it was good to see my family again, but it was two months that I felt was wasted as all my friends were in university and I only really saw people a couple of times. And all I wanted was to come back here.

May 2005 I signed on to Job-Seeker's-Allowance, which wasn't much but it was nice to have money to do with what I wanted for the first time in my life. When my sister came to spend the summer with us that year, I was able to take her out and buy her things and not have to rely on people around us. And it was nice, it was a first.

In late October 2005, I got a job at Norwich Union as a temp through an agency. And this is when my life started to look up. I still remember my first day. I turned up early, had to wait for the representative from the agency to get there, and then wait for the other three people who were starting on the same day. Then the agency rep took two of the others off to their new teams and a tour of the building, leaving me and the other guy to wait for who would become our new manager.

Took my seat, all shy and quiet, I said hi when the guy next to me introduced himself.

He was cute =).

First day we had to read all this information and do tests on them to make sure we knew practices. Data Protection, Money Laundering, Health and Safety, that kind of stuff. Apparently the entire first day was supposed to be spent on this, and some of the next if we needed it. But, I finished all of mine in under three hours, and got to go home early.

The next day my training started, I guess I picked up quickly, but I was still very shy and introverted. I just didn't know how to talk to these new people, how to relate to them, what to say. It helped a bit when the guy who was training me started asking a bunch of stuff about Canada. He was the first to really talk to me.

Then, I remember when I got my permanent ID and system access set up. And the first person to introduce himself, who happened to be the team's consultant, sent me a test message to make sure it worked. Since, M has told me that he felt sorry for me and wanted to talk to me because I was the shy, cute, little mouse in the corner. That single e-mail led to constant messaging via the work's e-mail server daily, conversation, jokes. We became friends through that and through laughing together and chatting during team games.

Around Christmas time of 2005, a "team Christmas do" was scheduled, but the day we were supposed to go out, I had a bad throat infection and my manager told me to go home. I came back the next day and heard the stories, and still wish I was able to go. But M asked me if I would be up to another outing a couple days later, since I couldn't make it. We all went out that Thursday, but most people left within the first hour or two, leaving me and M, and L and B. L was my trainer, B is the guy who started with me.

We all sat together and chatted and joked all night, and it was nice. But mostly, I got to know M a lot better. We shared a lot of personal stories and stuff, laughed and joked... I was really surprised with how comfortable I felt with him. It was almost like we'd been friends for years at that point, instead of only a couple of months. We just... clicked.

I think it was then that I really started to realize how much I liked him. We had really similar personalities and it was just so easy to talk to him. We found the same things funny, had similar opinions on a lot of things. That night, we became far closer friends than we were.

Soon it was time to have a week off for Christmas, and we had gone out with the team a couple more times between. M gave me a couple innocent hugs, and I can remember thinking that they were the best hugs ever. I didn't want to let go. The evening before our little holiday, I got a text after we left the pub after work, saying "I can't wait to go back to work as I miss you already".

He was sweet and adorable. I think at that point, I was already beginning to fall for him.

In the middle of January, we decided to finally make good on the promise we had kept making to go to a movie and hang out after work one day. Wednesday, January 11th, 2006 was our first date. I was so nervous, and so excited. And I wasn't even sure what it was. Was it a casual meeting of friends outside of work, was it a casual date, was it.. a proper date? Was this a relationship? In all honesty there never ensued a boyfriend-girlfriend-what-is-this conversation. There was never any need.

That night, we shared some personal stuff about our lives and histories and... things that aren't talked about much. We were just very open with eachother. The movie was crap but I enjoyed it, just to be beside him. I got a kiss on the cheek, got on my tram, he got on his bus, and it was back to work as usual, but we had more to talk about at work the next day in our constant e-mails.

We met eachother in town the following Saturday and he gave me a quick peck on the lips on the tram as I was going home. It was so cute, he was being so shy. Then on Sunday evening we met in town again, played some pool, shared some music.. and had our first real kiss. I think by that point we both knew that we really wanted to be together. So there was never really any need to have the where-we-stand conversation. It was unspoken but it was always there.

I still remember the way he used to kiss me, so passionate. After hanging out after work in town, he used to wait with me by the bus-stop, and we were that couple. The couple who make out at the tram stop incessantly. People would walk by and say "Get a room!" and I would miss my tram at least twice before finally getting on the way home. I still love it when he kisses me like that.

He would pick me up for work on Saturdays when we worked overtime, and even brought an umbrella to the door for me when it was raining. He would surprise me with flowers for no reason, and write me little love notes at work and pass them to me in secret.

It was only two and a half weeks before he told me he loved me. That he had fallen hard and I was all he could see or wanted or needed. And I felt the same way. It's the most intense emotion I have ever felt in my life, and I think that I ever will. My love for M is the all-encompassing unconditional kind of love that families share. He is my world and I do truly believe that in him I have found my soulmate. I feel so so very lucky to have found him, and at such a young age.

We've been living together since April 16th, 2006. And we're not sick of each other yet. I've always heard that living together is the true test of a relationship, because two people being around eachother constantly will put a pressure on. That's the time real relationships are made and broken. But I still love him even more every day, and we still get along fantastically.

I can't wait to spend the rest of my life with him.

=) And neither can our families.

In late May of 2006, I went back to Canada to visit for three weeks. He joined me for two of them but that first week back was the most unhappy and lonely I have been in my life. I missed him more than even I thought that I would, I hated it there. Not only because he wasn't beside me, but... it just doesn't feel like home anymore. I hated it, and cried a lot that first week. I talked to him for hours when he got home from work every day. And it was like a blessing when I met him at the airport and was able to hug him again. It was the first time we had been apart since we'd been together.

The first week he was there we enjoyed. My mother's husband was in the other side of the country for the week at a family reunion. We did our own thing, took my mom out quite a bit, since she never gets out of the house except to go to work.

But then he came back and the rest of the holiday... Well, it was okay but we were both dying to go back. We both hated it. I have never been happier to be home in my life as I was when we got out of the car and walked into our house back here in England.

I guess that brings me to now. Hopelessly in love, happy, far more outgoing. He did more for me than he'll ever know, and I don't know how to put it in words. He is truly the source of my happiness, the centre of my universe. The missing half of myself that makes me complete when we are together.

Unfortunately, my grandmother and aunts and I have booked two weeks in Majorca come October 2006. And it's going to be an intensely lonely time for me. I won't be able to call as much, or e-mail him when he's at work without me. But I'll love him all the more for missing him, and it will be ever the sweeter when I see him the day I get back. I'll try to enjoy myself, but it's going to be hard.

So, I suppose that's the end. Draw your own conclusions, I guess. I've left a couple of things out for respect of other people - really, as close as I am to them, it isn't fair for me to spill everybody's life story in the course of telling mine. But the brunt of it is there. That's me.. in a very large and hollow nutshell.

August 9th, 2006