well. .

Even as a stick figure my family was never really as good as theirs. "Why is your mom taller than y our dad?" my teacher asked me. i wasn't aware that there was a stick figure format to abide by. i simply placed the slanted stream of 5 sticks from olderst to youngest, and my mom is older than my father.

Anyway it was a pre-requisite tot he next 5 years of so and how they would shape me today. I used to think we weren't as good as everyone else. I heard the whispers, saw the heads turn, witnessed the abrupt ending of a conversation as soon as i entered a room. Apparently a teacher even gave a lecture to my math class while I wasn't there to let them know what had happened and how they act towards me. i aboslutely hated that everyone in the town read the newspaper, saw the news, heard the radio and had already started the rumors and sympathetic treatment before i knew what they knew. They knew more than me, and it was my last name too and it wasn't fair. If they were going to judge and assume, at least let me know what they're basing it on. i snuck downstairs one night shortly after and njherald. com told me everythign i needed to find, but wished I had never seen. i read the graphic details and reactions of the public and to this day it makes me literally sick. all of the times I was told that it was okay to talk and people were there for me was never proven more untrue. in the past 5 years I have been disappointed and hurt by the people who held the deepest darkest and most sacred hands of my trust,a nd will be forever considered as such, no matter how I've tried to make that feeling go away. If something was, then it always will be. Time can only be a temporary blanket, but you can still see the shape fromunderneath pressing upwards.

I've lost a stick figure in my family. That was a long and terrible story. But wehre I am now, and the love I received back recently has proven to me that there are not enough blank papers in the world to hold the shapes of things i now hold dear...

but I'll save that story for another time.