As I said in Part 2, a lot of my memories are really fuzzy for a few years after my dad died. I never thought about it before I wrote Part 2 either, but I'm sure that it is a psychological coping mechanism. Really, I spent much of that time in a fantasy world. I had this friend, Cari, who was going through some serious trauma too (although I didn't really know that at the time). The two of us loved to read, and we would make up stories and play them out on the playground, and eventually we started writing our own stories. At home I watched cartoons and sitcoms almost constantly. I read books. I played out stories with my My Little Ponies. I lived in fantasy 95% of the time. I was enabled by adults who praised and rewarded me for my uniqueness and chalked it all up to creativity.
My fantasy world came crashing down when I was eleven and Cari moved away...I think she grounded me in that world, and when she left it was like being shaken out of a deep sleep. I realized how isolated I was from the other kids at school. They all seemed comfortable in the real world. They were having their little first boyfriends and girlfriends and being social with each other and none of them watched cartoons or played with My Little Ponies anymore. I started writing short stories, most of them involving young adults in their late teens/early 20's. They were generally cheesy love stories. I remember one in particular was about a girl who rode horses in the circus who tried to run away with an acrobat. Her father, who spoke with a thick Mediterranean accent, saved her from making a huge mistake. I also remember knowing that the exposition was thin and the dialogue cheesy.
My mom got married when I was 13. We moved and I changed schools. Having spent the last six years in fantasy land, I had no idea how to make friends or function socially. I didn't know how to act around all the strangers at my new school, so I did nothing. I didn't talk to people, I didn't look at them. I tried to become invisible. Trouble was, I had been working far ahead of these kids at my old school and I loved learning; it was hard to be invisible and active in class at the same time. The other kids, apparently, thought I was a snob for not talking to them and they started teasing. It was merciless, and it came to a point where I was crying in my room every day. I thought it was their fault. I thought they were mean. I didn't know what I could possibly do to make things better for myself. I was thirteen and miserable.
When my mom caught wind of the whole bad situation she took mercy on me and enrolled me in the local Catholic school, which had one classroom for each grade. There were 16 kids in my entire grade! I still didn't talk much, and I still got teased, but at least they were actually on my intelligence level. There was a really great element of academic competition, and I was in the top three, battling it out against the coolest kid in the class (Matt someoneorother) and the bitchiest girl I have ever met to this day. I was discovering a little bit of who I was at school with this whole competition thing, and learning about the kind of person I could be in reality.
It was also about this time that I developed a near-desperate need to become closer with my dad's family, his six living brothers and sisters and my grandparents. This could have been a reaction to my mom's remarriage. It also could have been a reaction to learning--and for the first time, fully understanding the implications of--how he died. I began understanding that I wasn't the only person who was affected by his death, and that it wasn't my fault. It was probably around this time that my four aunts (including Aunt J) started meaning what they have come to mean to me.
I remember a particular Thanksgiving (I was fourteen, maybe?), sitting around the table at my grandparents' condo with the Aunts and Salty, and it was the first time I ever talked openly about my dad and what had happened to him. I remember the realization growing inside me that they too had experienced his death and my uncle's death, but that they hadn't stopped living. They were having relationships and families and careers and happiness and self-discovery. I no longer saw them as extensions of my dad, and instead they became my aunts, independent of him, and four strong, smart women who live their lives on their terms as much as possible. I think that might have been the first time I understood that my life wasn't ruined.
That night was a real turning point for me. Instead of pretending in my mind to be someone else, I started having ideas about who I could be and how I would get there. I started thinking about my future and goals and ideals...and I started running.
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