Prologue
Énouement (n) the bitterness one feels after realizing how their future has turned out, and not being able to warn their past self
Fall of Senior Year
There are few moments in life filled with as many possibilities as the first day of college.
I’d been full of dreams when I began freshman year. They say starting college is beginning the rest of your life. That it’s where you go to grow into the person you’re meant to be.
I fully bought into the mindset, but now if anyone said it to my face, I’d say they were full of shit.
This isn’t a story about a girl growing into a woman.
This is a story about the only life that girl had known being snatched away on a dark, rainy night, on some backwoods Louisiana highway. That dream died alone in the dark.
I was so naive, thinking that I could have it all. If you work hard, you’ll succeed. That’s what the motivational posters say.
What they don’t say is that all of your hard work will quite possibly never pay off. There are no “Give it your all and prepare to get nothing in return” posters. Maybe there should be. I could at least say that I’d been warned.
After all of the effort and hard work I put into gymnastics during the years, I’m hard pressed to find a reason to go on. My friends have either abandoned me or aren’t speaking to me at the moment. I quite possibly ruined my most important relationship, the one with my twin. And the man I figured out too late that I love is with someone else.
I laid every brick of the lonely path I’m forced to walk now, but I can’t bring myself to care anymore.
Babe Ruth said, “It’s hard to beat a person who never gives up”.
Well Babe, this is me.
Giving up.
