The Beginning

  I looked out the white screen door at the beige pick-up truck slowly pulling out of my white paved drive-way. As his truck pulled away I felt the air in my lungs quickly escape as the anxiety awaiting in the pit of my stomach began to rise. The one single thought I had been dreading since our first reunion under the stars that summer came rushing back to the front of my brain. What if I never saw him again? Change was inevitable. But that does not mean I had to welcome it. I, Mary-Kate, all seventeen years of my life, was never a fan of change. I turned around and pressed my back against the screen door. I breathed in those last few breaths of small-town summer air before I headed up the stairs to my room. Or what was left of my room for that matter, since my whole life had been packed into boxes. Seventeen years, could fit into ten important boxes. These ten important boxes would follow me to university tomorrow where I would begin my very important and intellectual life. As I sat on my bed I could hardly comprehend how I thought leaving my mother, my life, and my town to go to a foreign place and study english literature would be a good idea. First of all, I like reading, but only books that I choose. Secondly, my grammar is horrible. My true passion is writing. That is, writing from the heart, not the brain. As soon as you add rules and grammar to my writing, all passion is lost. Therefore, I was second guessing my choice to be an english major since I still did not know how to correctly use a comma. But most importantly, the gaping hole in my chest was not from the fact that I was leaving my beloved small town, it was that I was leaving the love of my life, the Sunny to my Cher. Tomorrow was the end of an era, the end of a dream. The dream that I would finally be with my one true love was shattered when he decided to go to school nine hours away. Of course this happens to many teenagers, love gained, love lost. Life moves on, literally.

 The next morning I awoke in a cold sweat. My heart beating out of my chest before I even had time to put on a bra. The boxes were loaded. I wore my sexiest black t-shirt and ripped jeans. Casual, but stylish. I was going to be cool in university, every boy would fall to my knees and it would be the time of my life. This is what I had to tell myself every minute on what seemed like a four hour drive. We arrived at the residence and I wanted to throw up, and faint, and go home. The boxes were unpacked, the clothes arranged in place. The goodbyes were said and I sat on my new bed, in my new room, numb and alone. All of a sudden I heard a banging on my door, I went to open it to find my one highschool friend who had decided to attend the same school as I, in the same dorm, only a floor away. Smile on her face, booze in her hand, she barged in and gave me a giant bear hug. Avery was the kind of girl that could make anything better with her carefree personality.

"I'm so proud of you!" she exclaimed, "I thought for sure you would be crying in bed by now!" she laughed, her blonde hair brushing her shoulders. She set the booze on the table and made herself at home. She found the two shot glasses I had bought as tokens from Paris and New York and filled them to the brim with Smirnoff original flavoured vodka. Shaky, numb, and depressed I picked up the glass and did what all university students seemed to do to cope. I drank. I drank 1, 2, 3, 4, and more shots of that vodka. We wandered around the residence, asking random people to drink with us and eventually found friends. We all gathered around my tiny table in my room, all of us new, insecure, and drinking away our sorrows. I thought to myself, maybe this change would not be so bad. There we were, five or six girls, most of us strangers, all going through the exact same thing. Maybe, if we stuck together, we could make it through it, maybe together, this would not be horrible, maybe together, it would be fun.