Prologue
“There I was, way off my ambitions, getting deeper in love every minute.”
- F. Scott Fitzgerald
- - -
1995
River- age 6
“Look up River.”
My mom lifted me onto the back of my dad’s truck and I looked up just like she told me to. I smiled when I heard my favorite song playing from the truck’s radio.
“See that baby? See the sky?”
I nodded my head, staring at the clouds as they passed with the wind in the dimly lit evening sky.
“No matter what, you keep the spirit you have now, River. Keep your head in the clouds."
I could tell she was going to cry but I couldn’t help but wonder what she was talking about.
But even as a kid, I knew something was different about what she was saying, she was trying to tell me something without actually saying it. I couldn’t understand why grown-ups did that. I heard my mom cough and saw the blood in her hand, my dad rushed us both back into his truck and that’s when my world seemed to stop spinning, from that moment on my life shifted into a different one than the one I was accustomed to. My dad reached across me and turned the radio down and my favorite song slowly faded away.
That was the first time I felt like I was watching my life from a different perspective, like an outsider looking in, but I wouldn’t figure out how to put that feeling into words until much much later.
