Chapter 1 (draft)
I mean sure there are some of us out there, with a heart that is. Is it made of pure gold? surely not, but they do have their silver linings. But those people are so few and far between. The rest, chameleons, but don't get me started on those reptilian creatures. Don't get me wrong not everyone here fits into those categories, there is always an exception to the rules. When everything is black and white, there is always a gray area. There are some that live between the two halves in the gray, so to speak. Neither good nor bad or pretentious nor sleazy. That's where I lived, in the gray, the in between. People like us just kind of fall through the cracks and are often looked past and forgotten about and I'm perfectly okay with that, ecstatic in fact! I wouldn't want it any other way. I don't want to be a self-absorbed stuck-up dickhead any more than I want to be a lowlife bottom feeder. I am quite comfortable living in the gray, elated in fact.
No, the best part of growing up in Port Place wasn't the people, we've established that. It was the ocean, the beach, the open vastness of it all. The warm salty air that tickles your nose when you breathe it in. It was the soft sand under your bare feet. The ocean sounds all around you, the crashing waves, the seagulls cry, the whistling wind whipping past you. The feel of the cool crisp water on your skin. The ocean glass and driftwood that painted its shores and its mass variety of sea life that bustled around you, stuck on their own tasks at hand. Almost seeming like they haven't a worry in the world. Nature in itself is beautiful, peaceful and an escape.
One of the many things I love about the ocean, was how one minute it was warm and sunny and then the next minute the sky would turn an eerie gray and suddenly fill with dark storm clouds, ready to burst at any minute. Or how a soft breeze could turn into a 50 mile and hour plus wind at a moment's notice... kind of like my life. You see, me and the ocean have a lot in common. Which is why I love it so much, why I understand it so well and in return it also understands me or at least I'd like to believe so. It was that simple belief that we were connected, the ocean and I. That there must have been a greater purpose for me because of that. That's what kept me going all these years, what kept me hanging on during all the hardships and all the abuse that I was forced to endure throughout my childhood.
The ocean is a mysterious body of water. You give and it takes, but strangely enough at the same time that its busy taking its oddly giving. Who really knows what secrets are trapped beneath its depths. The tides always ebbing and flowing with the pull of the moon, bringing new life ashore while it also rips lives away all in the same motion, taking whatever or whomever it so chooses out to sea, never to be seen again, lost for eternity into the dark abyss. There were so many times in my life that I wished the ocean would just take me, drag me out to sea, save me from the torment that I call my life.
I was born into a rough life from the moment I arrived, nothing was as it should be. Whatever the hell that actually means. I wouldn't really know since I've never actually experienced said life, one can only imagine. I just knew early on that something, many things, were lacking. I was born unto a emotionally disturbed and mentally unstable mother and a booze and drug addicted schizophrenic father. From the moment I took my first breath the odds were forever stacked against me. Come to think of it, it was well before that. I'd have to say it was the moment of conception. It wasn't even supposed to be, my conception that is. or was it? Sometimes I would imagine that there was a purpose for everyone and everything and that everything happened for a reason and the greater your suffering, the greater your purpose. But more often than not this thought brought me little comfort while in the midst of turmoil.
It all started one night when my dead-beat father came home in a drunken drug induced stupor. I can't really say what exactly happened next in exact detail because I wasn't physically there, nor would I want to be, considering the subject matter. But my lowlife father comes home wasted off his ass per usual, roughs my mother up a bit and well, you get the drift. But I can tell you the end result, me. Funny how I know this little tidbit of information from the night of my conception. Well actually it isn't really funny at all. You see a few years back while my dear mother was having one of her many psychotic episodes, she felt the need to inform me that I wasn't a product of love. Oh no, in fact, just the opposite. She let slip that faithful day that I was in fact a product of rape, and she treated me as such throughout my life.
I was often beaten and starved, treated as a slave but most of all forgotten about completely. That part I could handle, I always viewed it as a blessing in disguise. Life was always much more manageable when I was invisible. So, I tried to stay out of sight and out of mind. Which is why I spent as much time as I did wondering the beaches. Avoiding my home as much as possible. For my own physical and mental wellbeing.
