Walking down the beach makes me think about all the times in high school I would sit on the swings looking over towards the water. I always wondered how my life would turn out: Where I would go to college? Would I ever fall in love with the right person? Who would I be? Truth is, I still do not have it all together. Everyone always has a perception that I’m on top of everything, and I have a lot going for me. It is all the things that happened behind closed doors that shape us. No one ever saw the pain, terrified eyes, or sweat from the nightmares.
We all have our own battles to get to where we are today. I had my battles in high school, seeing someone as a best friend one day and then seeing that same person who I helped shelter from her own problems tell people all my secrets, harshest realities, and all those damn closed doors. I got through it in front of everyone in school to see, but it was when I came home from school where it would all come out. I would not call her anything, we had some good memories before all that happened. I wish things went differently than how they did. I remember coming home crying because I felt so alone in a new place after putting my trust in the wrong friend. It’s okay, I’ve let that go. I’ve grown from it, and though I haven’t seen her since high school, I can say that if I say her tomorrow or the next five years, I would wish her nothing but the best.
There used to be this boy, the first boy who complicated my life, he befriended me during the first few days of school. We became friends eventually, but it was what happened years later that shook me. I saw him at his worst, walking to ninth period English class fifteen minutes late to physically assault another student only a few days before school was ending. The following year he wasn’t there. It didn’t matter to me, we had a falling out because it was high school. I didn’t put the pieces together until the day it happened; I walked to school every morning at the same time, and I would occasionally see him and do the polite “Hey, how are you doing?” and continue on my way to school. Occasionally became frequently; frequently became every day. That day though, I wasn’t mentally prepared for it at only sixteen. I saw him, did the usual hi-goodbye thing, but this time he grabbed my arm from my arm he went down to my waist and so on. I felt the discomfort immediately. One block away from school, he grabbed me as I tried to run, but I broke the grip and stumbled into school crying. I didn’t ask for what happened next. It was up to the police to decide. I let it be, and let everyone say what they had to say. They didn’t have to feel the way I did, but that’s okay.
Even recently I’ve had my fair share of problems. A manager that I confided in when I left my family recently told me that when I worked for him, he wondered “where’d a ‘lil Greek girl get a butt like that?” His words; not mine. Trust is a funny thing. When I was younger I had all this trust in the world that nothing would ever happen to me. What I would give to go back to that; not having any worries about who to trust and no fears. Now, I’ve finally learned that trust is something that you build over time. I see people for who they are every day, including myself. That manager, he’s a boy trapped in a thirty-something year old’s body; that boy in high school that stalked me apologized to me and owned up to his mistakes; and that girl who told everything there was to really know about me is off somewhere living her life because what happened in high school is in the past. Look at the present; the beach is full of rocks, the water is salty, and I’m smiling because for the first time in a long time, I’m happy with the path I’ve chosen for my life.