Solstice
Part I: Winter Solstice

Love of life. It laid within me like a sweet inner child, fascinated in the same way infants are with smells and sights and sounds and textures. I was fifteen, but everything around me felt so incredibly wonderful, making me feel lucky to be able to enjoy the simplicities and intricacies of... Life. I loved everything. I loved the way on walks through the grounds of Anikee, trees would form canopies overhead. They way sunlight filtered through the green leaves and into my cold skin, warming the smooth, cold surface of my bones. Everything made my smile, wide and pure, vulnerable and pretty. I loved the way brown leaves crunched under my shiny black school shoes, lifeless, skeletons that fell from their mothers. To become the soil, the soil on which their children would grow.

We meet me in 1985, fifteen, Catholic, a firm believer in good and faith. Wanting to believe in God but unsure, nonetheless having a love affair with the devine Earth he had laid in front of me. I held a lot of faith and hope in the world, in the way my life would play out in front of me, knowing whatever paths I took would shape me. Everything, back then, left me breathless and excited. Things that did not effect others, effected me greatly: A baby crying, a mother's love, a teenager laughing. People who returned smiles left me feeling dizzy. I, at my young age, saw everything as great. Everything was great. Everything was immaculate. Everything was... fine.

The Summer was waning and it was edging towards my time to return to school, into tenth grade with only two more years to go. I had metamorphosized over the holiday, my bones turning and twisting and stretching into something quite beautiful, my face losing most of its childhood roundness and making hollows and shadows across it, my silky hair growing long. I had, over Summer, become a woman. Or, atleast, I was now in the body of a woman. I didn't feel like a woman.

That year I was to go to a new school - a boarding school named Anikee. From the brochures it gleamed in the sunlight, a white, imperial palace, a mess of cocurriclurs and awards and smiling students and high test scores.

Anikee, although I did not know it yet, would change me profoundly, in a way I could never have imagined. It broke down barriers, repelled optimism, sneered in the face of beauty. It turned my beautiful world upside down and said see? see that man over there, hitting that woman? see that little boy littered with bruises and his brooding mother? see that man whose been beaten down by your so-called Life? see? SEE? It grabbed my cheeks and turned my head in the direction of the poorer streets I had avoided, showed me the suffering of millions, showed me the forgotten victims and the silent masochists. It shook my cage and rattled it, popped the bubble in which I had lived. Anikee showed me the rawness of the world and did not sugar coat my expiriences. Anikee would become the incubator of the woman I would turn into, the woman I am today. It showed me there was a lot to learn, if I thought I could love everything.

Who I am today is hard to explain, but I can tell you now that I am twenty-three, an athiest, a firm believer in evil and the cruel randomness of life. Wanting to believe in God but knowing that if he does exist, he is incredibly malevolent, and not sure that I'd even want anything to do with him. I hold a lot of faith and hope in my friends, but in nothing else. Very little makes my breath catch anymore.

This story, right here, of my growing up and existance, that you may or may not read, is the story of regression and progression, of innocence lost or knowledge found or something like that. It's the story of me, a girl called Lucy, and a boy that changed everything, called Donnie. It's the story of teenage lovers, a story about how you never feel older than you do when you're growing up and way too mature for your age. It's a story about love and hope and fear and confession and faith and angst and confusion and wonderment and obsession. It's the hearbeat the twitches through your veins and into your heart. Expirience the rawness, the imperfection, the beauty and the nakedness of being a teenager and being loved, hated, feared, considered and lost.

i don't know what you'll think but i do hope you like it.
would you mind very much if you could press the review button and tell me what you think?
please?
x I Shed Myself