Reaching for Heaven

Prologue-

All of my life, for every minute that I can remember, I’ve always wanted something. I don’t know what this something was, and nothing I ever did could seem to satisfy the hollow ache within me. I dated, but no girlfriend ever seemed to fill the void within me. My friends didn’t understand me, my parents thought I was hopeless, and to be honest, I was starting to agree with them. Maybe I was just too picky to be satisfied with anything anybody could offer me. Who knew? Not I, for certain.

My life, while not a complete wreck, was beginning to reflect the gnawing emptiness within me. My grades slipped, a letter grade here and there, until I’d gone from an A student in middle school to a C in high school. I stopped hanging around my friends so much, and I retreated into myself. Sometimes...sometimes when the loneliness got to be too much for me, I’d think about killing myself, and once or twice I actually sliced a little into my wrist, but I always chickened out at the last second. My life was, slowly but surely, spiraling out of control.

My art teacher, Mr. Adams, told me that I ought to look to my art for the answers I needed, for he believed that my art reflect the haunting need for something that I was so afraid to talk to most people about. And so...I did. I started to draw, whenever I felt that something trying to make itself known to me, and what I found scared me. What I wanted...it wasn’t right, it wasn’t natural, and my parents would kill me if they ever found out. And so I locked it away, in my sophomore year of high school, and for a while, things were okay. Throughout the entirety of my sophomore and junior years in school, I was okay. I was...I’d hesitate to say happy, but I was content. My dirty little secret, my desire for something I now refused to name, stayed locked in my room, sketches of something scrawled over the blank pages of countless sketchbooks. And I reclaimed my life. My friends were glad to have the original me back, my teachers were thrilled as my grades skyrocketed once more, and my parents couldn’t have been prouder of their straight A, good Christian little boy. None of them ever really noticed the scars on my wrists.

And then, as quickly as it had all come together, it all fell apart. Mr. Adams passed away, and I lost the only person who knew everything about me, my closest friend and confidante. And then HE showed up. He breezed into our small town straight out of a New York City art college, I don’t know which, and took the position Mr. Adams had left behind. Like the fierce wind that was his namesake, Lysander Gale blew into my life, and turned it all inside out.