Quoteables and Literature 1/28

Alright, now quoteables and literature is going to come out every monday, or at least I will try.  Here is a story sent in by someone who would like to remain annonymous.  It is a bit long, but it’s a fairly good read.  The genre is realistic fiction.

I try to sneak to my room after diner, eager to be away from the yelling, crowds, and turmoil that is my family after diner on a Wednesday night. As usual, my step-mom is growling at one of my brothers not to hit the other one and the brother who did the hitting is yelling something half intelligible back.  The brothers usually have four big fights a week, and tend to be constantly at odds to some degree, but they will band together in camaraderie when it comes to opposing me.  The tiny, crowded space of the kitchen is a blur of half-eaten diners, plates, and bodies.  I quickly dart into the small space, made even smaller by my parents and the dishwasher.  I throw my dishes into the gaping machine, bring some more in, and then make my break for it.  The oddness of this is strangely normal to me, after two years of these family diners, after which I almost always feel like crawling under a rock.  My family doesn’t call me the black sheep for nothing.

I slink into my room and close the door, which is covered in black chalkboard paint and random drawings.  My room, oddly, is a fairly bright blue with dragonflies painted in different places on the walls, each one different.  Unlike me, my room is bright and vibrant.  The paint doesn’t exactly capture my personality.  What does is everything else. A big, overflowing bookshelf dominates one corner, hung with images of dragons and other mythical creatures.  On the walls are a few pictures of things out of books and not much else.  The shelves are full of yet more books and figures.  Music and instruments are placed at random around, almost like furniture.  Half sanctuary, half prison.

I careful sidestep my backpack and duffel bags that are always packed and make my way over to my computer.  The old, decrepit, hand-me-down laptop whirrs to life as I hit the space bar.  Sitting down, I quickly pull on my headphones, looking to drown out the angry voices coming from down the hall.  I glance hopefully at the clock. Just two more hours until everyone should be asleep.  I should be too at that time, but I never am.  I keep expecting my dad or step-mom to walk in and say something about me being a rebel and not complying by staying up late, something about how they are going to take away my computer next time and that it is time to go to bed.  As usual, no one appears, though I still dread it when they do.  I never go to sleep on time.  I’m usually up writing or listening to music or more likely a combination of the two.   I am a creature of the night, inspired by darkness and the stars, whereas my parents, and the rest of my family come to think of it, are maybe not morning people per say, but they are very much day time people.

Eventually, I do manage to stop writing and go to sleep about two hours after the time my parents said that I have to be asleep by.  Who can be ready to sleep at 10pm, much less actually be sleeping?  I have a pile of books beside my bed, and I pick one to read.  As usual, it’s a fantasy novel, though this one is better than plain old fiction.  It’s a horror novel about vampires, one of my favorite mythical creatures.  I can relate to them, strangely enough.  My family thinks so too, and they call me “the vampire” or “the hermit” for staying in my semi-lit room all day. After about a half hour of reading, I turn off the lights and sleep.

As usual, in the morning I am woken by the metallic bleeping of my alarm clock, or should I say clocks. I have two, since one is hard to read but has a good alarm, and vise versa for the other one. Being very much not a morning person, I throw my self out of bed and go smack the stupid thing on the snooze button.  There are three more hours until school starts for crying out loud!!! Why do I torture my self by setting my alarm for before the sun is even thinking of rising?  Twenty minutes later and a few more smacks to my alarm clock, I get up and get dressed.

Not only is my personality totally at variance with that of my collective family, my fashion sense is too.  I love dark colors, jeans, and boots.  My family thinks that it’s fun to comment on what I wear to school before I leave, which, apparently unbeknownst to them, makes me uncomfortable and self-conscious all day.  Fortunately, I usually leave before anyone else is awake enough to notice.  I am really different from my family in many ways, and these things usually lead to even more conflict.  For instance, I am the only vegetarian among a family of not-so-vegetarians.  A difference in religion makes some family discussions strange, with me being the only non-Christian among the six of us.  My love of classical music against their love of rap.  Tim Burton against Adam Sandler.  Books against television.  Organized clutter against pristine anality.  Talk about different. I know their intentions are good most of the time, but they have a hell of a way of trying to help me.

Walking to school, I look up, hoping for clouds and little sun. For once, I get my wish.  The sky is a beautiful dark overcast grey of thick, heavy clouds.  Again unlike my family, I love the rain and would take a thunderstorm over sun any day.  As I reach the school campus, the rain begins to fall in big, fat drops that seem to soak everything in seconds.  I blissfully traipse along, humming some random song that is stuck in my head.  I am usually happy when I go to school, because at school I don’t have to act for anyone, or try to be something I’m not.  I just do what I love and that tends to get me by.  After school, I know that I will have to go home eventually and be grumped at some more about some seemingly trivial matter before I can quietly retreat into, as my family calls it, “my cave”.  Until then, I am the real me.

“The coward dies a thousand deaths, the brave man…only five hundred.”
~Meredith Willson, The Music Man