Prologue

I have never really been all that great at talking about myself, as evidenced by the post you are about to read. For that, I am deeply sorry. I hope you can manage to bear with me as we struggle through this post together.

The objective of this post is for you, the reader, to get to know me better. I think one of the most important things you should know about me is that this makes me extremely uncomfortable. I do not like for people to see beyond the wall I put up, and when I have to write or talk about myself, those walls are lowered. I am really fine with whatever people think about me, as cliché as it sounds, because I know that I don’t let them see who I am when they are not around. But I guess, for the purpose of this post (and my grade,) I’ll tell you a little about myself.

Let’s just start from the beginning, folks: I was raised in a little ol’ town in Missouri. When I was about four, my parents decided they wanted to move to an even smaller town, the home town of my mom, my mom’s mom, and my mom’s mom’s mom. They bought some land about a quarter of a mile away from my grandma’s house, and for the entire time they were building it, we lived on a bus in my grandma’s front yard. The origin of that bus is another 500 words in itself, but I’ll sum it up as best I can: My family, well my mom, her two brothers, and her parents, were a traveling bluegrass band, renowned throughout the Midwest. On weekends they would travel to Iowa, or Minnesota, or Illinois, playing music. In order to travel to these places, they had a bus with four beds, a recliner, and a futon, complete with a kitchen and the worst toilet ever. I guess it wasn’t as long of a story as I thought…

So anyway, we lived on a bus for roughly a year. The four of us were miserable inside the cramped space, but it was home and it provided us with plenty of memories. When the house was finally finished, we abandoned the bus we grew to love and loathe, and moved into the two-story house that my parent’s had built. That house will always be home to me. It holds the memories of playing war with my brother in the woods, the sound of laughter as we played football on a wet trampoline (which I do not encourage, especially if you do not enjoy losing the use of your left arm for a few months,) and the reminiscence of a simpler time. The memories aren't all good though; this was the house we lived in when my parents decided to get a divorce, which was a pretty heartbreaking thing. For the most part, I'm over it now, but sometimes the pain of that event hits me again.

I was always an imaginative youngster, writing stories and acting out scenes from books. In hindsight, I was pretty weird. I spent much of my time alone and enjoyed it. My brother was probably my closest friend, though I've never told him so. That's another big part of me: I don't tell people things. I like to keep how I feel to myself. Which, I guess, is a pretty good note to end this prologue of my life story on. I wanted to recall happier events in my life, and recently it doesn’t seem like there have been any, and I wouldn’t want to bore you with tales of my teenage years.