Sasha

I was sitting alone in my room, staring at how the lilac walls clashed with the tacky aqua carpet. I was bored out of my mind due to the slight inconvenience of being grounded, muttering about how much I hated “Princess” and about how much Shelly makes life worth living, when I had a great idea. This marvellous idea was to vent out my frustration into a journal, and to write down the major events that led up to my grounding. That may sound weird, but as I said, I was bored.

It was only when I began to write that I realized how long it would take me to complete the journal, for a lot of things had happened in the past 17 years. It amazed me how long it took to find an appropriate starting for my story. After all, the thing that changed my life was something that, sadly, happens to so many people. It should have been easy to explain, but it wasn’t. I sat there in my room, no longer bored stiff from thinking about “Princess” and Shelly, pondering how to write the beginning of my tale.

At first I thought it should be something along the lines of: ‘Imagine the worst bit of news that you can hear when you’re a child’, but I decided against it. After all, there could have been a few things worse than what I heard, not many, but a few nonetheless. Then I was thinking of writing out the definition of devastation, but that seemed too stiff for the start of a life altering journey. You can see my dilemma, I couldn’t think of an accurate way to start my story, nothing could show what I wanted to say.

Hours went by and the best that I could think of was ‘My worst memory is the day that my life changed, the day that I stopped being happy, the day that the things I loved most were ripped away from me.’ Again, I decided against it. It was too depressing and emotional. Heaven forbid that someone should actually read this journal and decide just from the opening sentence that I was an ‘Emo’.

I was back to square one, with only an idea of how to start; one simple word, ‘memory’. That was how I wanted to introduce my life, with my worst memory. Only, I wouldn’t quite make it as depressing as my other ideas. After careful deliberation, I chose to start on the worst day of my life, and wrote about the terrible memory that still haunts my dreams.