How am I supposed to start this book? Can someone tell me cause I don’t know. I should know. I learned how to read when I was barely four years old. I was always at the top of the highest level reading groups. Diagramming sentences really pissed me off in the fifth grade but that was due to my laziness and unwillingness to take extra time to memorize, Kinda how I did with the times tables in the third grade. In high school, I scored a perfect 30 in English on my ACT, I was in honors English and there I remained with the same twenty something students every year until we graduated.
I loved honors English except Shakespeare my senior year. I refused to read hamlet. I know I know it’s got the witches in it and I literally have found myself lately saying a prayer or two to Hecate, but yeah when I was 17 I gave zero fucks about William or the Witch of all witches. However, I did find an exception for the Shakespearean sonnet. I learned how to write the fuck out of a Shakespearean sonnet and I can still whip one out, in total accuracy of the rhyme scheme, quatrains and ending couplet in less than ten minutes right now, at this very moment. Its strange the things we choose to remember, isn’t it? Somehow Shakespearean sonnets got picked by my reticular activating system and it’s a thing I’ll be able to do forever. I like that.
Although I stopped striving to achieve anything academically by the middle of the eleventh grade, and barely passed my senior year, I was still an honor graduate. I sat in the box with the upper echelon of high-achieving students and accepted my diploma with a 3.67 overall GPA, feeling like a total fraud, not wanting to be there, at all.
There was nothing exciting about graduation for me. I always thought graduation meant getting to leave my parents house, which I wanted to do more than anything. I hated it there. What I found out quickly, though, was that graduating meant I had the choice of going to either LSU or LSU. Those were my dad’s exact words and my exact choices. Now that I am older and wiser I realize those two choices were choices many others do not get but many others also weren’t forced to live in complete contempt of everything, including my own life, and with parents who did everything they could to low key destroy me.
They won. They achieved their goal. I often wonder how they feel about that and then I remember that they blame me for being a horrible child. They have never once owned any of the horrible things that were done to me. Instead, they have stood like greek gods, piously upon their pillars, chain smoking cigarettes and looking down at me in disgust and disdain at the shame and embarrassment I caused them.
I haven’t spoken to my dad or my step mom in over eleven years. I heard my dad had cancer about 6 years ago, but I check the obituaries and his name hasn’t arrived…..yet.
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