Summer vacation is usually an uneventful time for me. I would usually be found doing homework or studying throughout the rest of the year and stressing myself out. Summer vacation is really the only time I have to relax and would be bored out of my mind most of the time. One hot summer day with nothing to do I decided to do a little late spring cleaning that I never got to. The hot summer weather seemed to be more unbearable since my room is a small room in the attic. The central air didn’t help much unless I turned the rest of the house into a giant cooler. My mother is never happy when I’d turn up the air saying that the rest of the house was too cold and of the bill she would get later that month. That day it felt as if my room had reached the nineties. Within minutes my small bedroom floor was covered with boxes, pages, papers, old toys, clothes, drawing pads, and only God knows what else. After a while I came across one of my old journals. I then decided to search for the rest. Soon I found all of my old journals, four in all. I was bored and didn’t think I had anything else better to do. I was encircled by all the things I had collected over the years when I grabbed my first journal and opened it up.
I was shocked by what I had found. I was about ten years old when I had written that journal. Sections of the journal were of scores of basketball games and how the games had went. That part of the journal wasn’t what surprised me. It was of the returning memories I had of those days. Memories I had long made myself forget and of why I put the journals away in the first place. I mostly spoke of how miserable I was with school and life in general. I was always the quiet kid in class and tried to keep to myself because I hated how I was treated by being teased or left out.
I hate them but I know I shouldn’t because that’s not what God would want.
I now even remember writing that down in my old room with pink walls and unicorn borders sitting in the center of the floor making sure no one was near. I did hate many of the people I knew back then but not all. I did have a few people I considered friends at the time but as the years went by I discovered that most of them were either backstabbers or we just didn’t really have anything in common and grew apart. In another entry I mention is that I thought that the only friends I could rely on were my pets since they would never do anything to hurt me. My pets were the only company that I really enjoyed. I complained in my journal of the people I hated, my friends, my father who was hardly ever home, my mother with her smoking, and my younger sister who I felt would always hate me. I soon noticed that it felt as if my throat was closing up and my vision was getting blurry. I was crying; which was something I had always tried to hide so that no one would worry about me or call me a baby.
I didn’t want to read anymore of that journal and so I moved onto the next one. I was graduating the eighth grade when I kept that journal. It’s not as if that journal was any better I found out. If not then it was worse than the first. One of the first pages was of a beloved pet that had died. I flipped through the pages as fast as I could so that I wouldn’t linger on those pages. If I did I knew it wouldn’t do me any good. Further on in the journal I had written of my first boyfriend. Some of it was good but mostly of me being stupid.
He didn’t show up to the movies again. This has to be the third time this month I think. I don’t understand why he doesn’t just call to say he can’t come or ever apologize. He does this all the time.
I remember always waiting outside of the movie theater for him hoping I would see him coming from around the corner until two minutes before the movie started. I always brought a friend with me. My parents always made me bring someone back then but now I think it’s because they knew that my boyfriend back then wouldn’t show up. Those four months were filled with heartache because I was with someone who I started to think didn’t really care about me all that much. Even though he was the one to break up with me, thinking he got bored of me, I figure I won in the end. Not only was I feel from further heartache but since I was angry at him all the time he never got so much as a kiss out of me. I knew that got to him because there was another entry in my journal.
I was at Kami’s house when out of nowhere he IMed her online. He asked if I was with her and she said no. She asked him why he broke up with me and he said ‘because there was no kissing and stuff.’ Not like I didn’t expect it but it still really hurt to hear it.
I remembered that day as well. It was the beginning of our freshman year in high school and decided to visit her since I knew we wouldn’t have the time to later on. That was also the same year I got my lifelong dream, my first dog, so all the heartaches I had didn’t seem as bad. That was really the first sign of happiness written in that journal. I was volunteering at an animal shelter at first to complete my Confirmation hours but decided to stay since I enjoyed it so much. That was something I looked forward to every Monday.
It’s mid June and I found my dream dog! He’s this beautiful black and white Siberian husky with the most gorgeous blue eyes I’ve ever seen. He’s also very big, the size of a wolf which I love. He’s so friendly and gentle and I know I have to get him no matter what. There’s only one problem, my mom. She’s not an animal lover like my dad and I. Knowing her she’ll make me wait until I’m fifteen to get a dog as part of our deal. What am I going to do?
Eventually I pulled through. I managed to convince my parents to see him and actually have him! I remember the first time my mother saw him.
It was so funny. He was in a little dog house but I managed to call him out. By the time he was fully out of the little dog house all I heard my mom say was ‘Oh my God. It’s Cujo!’
For that reason I almost named him Cujo by he was too sweet so I named him Ckukchi, (see-koo-chee), for the original Indian tribe in Siberia who breed the dogs. It was then that I flipped through some more pages and when I found a page I looked at the pictures of Ckukchi next to his ashes and started to cry. It was of the day after my birthday when he died.
It was my seventeenth birthday and everything was so perfect. My mom even let me skip school and just stay home that day. It was even snowing like how I wished it would. Ckukchi had been sick for a long time but was better that day until the evening. We were starting to have dinner. My mom made one of my favorites, steak with egg noodles and green beans, when all of a sudden I heard something fall. I knew exactly what the sound was and raced into the next room. Ckukchi was on his back having a seizure and choking on his food. Dad grabbed him, took him outside, and managed to revive him. We took him to an all-night emergency vets office and thought he’d be fine. Soon after we brought him back home he started up again. We were all crying including my mom I saw. When we brought him back to the vets we knew we couldn’t save him. He was very old and sick for a long time now. I sat right next to him, petting and talking to him until the light faded from his eyes and I knew he was gone. 12:37am.
I didn’t go to school for the next two days and kind of got in trouble for it from the vice principle but I didn’t care. I was doing nothing but crying and wasn’t speaking to anyone. I’d gone into a deep depression during that time and didn’t get any better until weeks later. I threw the journal aside not wanting to read anymore of it. I’d remembered the following pages of another boyfriend who’d was no better than the last and had left me because I’d questioned him of the rumors I’d been hearing of him cheating on me. I was heartbroken once more but didn’t care as much that time because I just decided to give up on dating at that point and not suffer like that anymore.
I’d moved onto the next journal that I had kept from high school to the beginning of college. Half of it was just of me complaining of the people around me. I hated most of the people I went to school with. Every year there would be a different guy whose only goal would be to make my life miserable. It got that I wanted to leave the school because I would be poked, had spit balls shot at me, be called a bitch and an asshole, and I don’t even want to mention the rest. I did nothing to these people. I just wanted to be left alone like I always had and do my work. My parents couldn’t believe what was going on and for the fact that the teachers would see it happening. High school was better than grade school I must say. I did have a few friends then but not many. I’d tried to choose my friends carefully at that point in my life. I had come across one page in my journal of a weekend class trip.
I was lying down on the couch next to the fire place curled up in a ball. It’s always so cold on these Esopus trips and always had to try and keep warm. I was half asleep and would sometimes overhear bits of what the people were saying around me. I heard my one friend say ‘Don’t do that!’ Apparently I later found out someone was making faces at me and was going to do other things but I didn’t want to know at that point. I later woke up alone, discovering I’d missed the mass and my friend’s coat on top of me. I later had it returned and thanked him for it.
I skimmed through the rest of the pages to my senior prom. For some reason I was really excited about that day. I didn’t have a date but didn’t care. I still didn’t want to date at that point which made it all that harder for me with this one guy I met who was in the limo with us. We started to talk but I tried to keep it as short as possible because I was really starting to like him and enjoyed talking to him. It didn’t get any easier for me once we got to the hall and sat down. I started to feel bad because he was asking why I wasn’t talking much and I just said I wasn’t much of a talker as a cover-up. It wasn’t until one of my friends came up and asked to sit at their table that I’d left. I wanted to go back to the table and sit with the guy for the rest of the prom but I didn’t want to chance being heartbroken again. I then started to laugh because the funny thing is a year and a half later I met up with this guy I met at prom again and we’re now engaged. I looked at the rest of my journal, which was only few pages, and saw that the rest of it was of him and that I was actually happy. I didn’t really realize it until then of how he’d really turned my life around for the better. I’d looked over at the journal on my shelf that I was currently keeping and realized the difference between that one and the others I’d kept, how much better my life was. It was then that I decided to throw out my old journals as a way to let go of my old life because I’m not that person anymore and be able live my new life.
