Prologue

I never wanted to tell my life’s story.

I never wanted to be staring at a blank sheet of paper, that was waiting for me to pour out my heart, soul and then some onto its untainted white surface.

Even now, I’m having second thoughts.

There are just some things that you’d rather not touch, you know? Memories that you don’t want to return to. Sometimes it’s just easier to move on, to forget the painful memories, many though they may be.

But then you think, “If I don’t save these memories, who will?”

It is, after all, your life.

I don’t know if that counts for much, but when you think about it, life is short. The way you live, the things you do… they’re all meaningless unless you write them down. After all, once you’re dead, that’s it. You’re gone, and your memories are mostly gone with you.

And what good is that to anybody?

And so you pick up a notebook, and a pen… you touch the pen tip to your cheek, thinking.

How do you begin the story of a life?

Should it be epic?

Suspenseful?

Ominous?

I mean, you can’t just begin with, “My name is Katharine Rose Mitchell (Katie for short) and I was born on June 13th, 1984.” Because that’s how everybody’s life begins.

No… you have to look deeper than that… you have to find that place where your life started. Everyone has their own different place—that day, that hour, that moment when life actually started. It’s the time when you stop fooling around, and you start living, whether by force or free will.

I guess you could say that my life as I know it started with The Divorce.

The Divorce happened on June 15th, 1995. (Technically, it wasn’t finalized until December, but we were long gone by then.)

But before I get ahead of myself, I should tell you that this isn’t one of those “girl-at-odds-with-world-finds-self-through-life-changing-sentimental-experience stories”. For starters, I’m not at odds with the world, by any means.

Just the people in it.

I like to think of it in these terms: if you were a happy, contented child, living a peaceful life in a quiet, seaside town with your family of four and your sheepdog, (who you happen to love more than life itself) and all of a sudden Hurricane Separation and Divorce flew in and basically blew everything you knew and cared about to smithereens, leaving you virtually without a father, without a house, and in the back of a 1992 Plymouth Voyager, traveling around the country to wherever your mother can find work, you probably wouldn’t appreciate it very much.

Yeah.

I didn’t either.

When I was younger, I used to believe that somehow, magic would take me under its soft wing and fly me back through time, back to what had been. Like all children of divorce, I had my own little fantasies of Mommy and Daddy getting back together, and the four of us moving back to that quiet little Georgia neighborhood.

But, inevitably, I came to finally face the reality—dreams don’t come true… and magic can’t solve problems.

Once childish fantasies were stripped away, I guess you could say that I was left with only memories. My mind categorized them, sorting them—the good from the bad, the laughter from the tears—and filed them away, like recipes in that box that Grams keeps in her kitchen. Sometimes I could pull them out selectively, some days the box just fell off of the shelf and scattered them everywhere all at once. And some days, they would just come randomly.

It occurred to me one day—I think we were at a Super 8 motel just outside Sacramento California— that I should write all this stuff down. I thought that maybe, if I went back through everything, I could find some kind of closure, some kind of cosmic revelation that everything that had happened did so for a reason.

So here goes.

Back to the beginning—back to the day that my life got its abrupt and unwanted start.

The day was June 15th…