And So The World Moves On. . .

[Anonymous]

When I was born, my parents were young and poor. My Father was a young and promising programmer always looking forward to his next endever, be it at home or at work. My Mother was a young women, with her eye set on climbing the corperate ladder. We lived in the upstairs half of this guy's house in a town called New Milford in New Jersey. Even though we moved out of there before I was 4, I still have a couple very foggy memories there, including ones from years later when revisiting.

Things went well for my parents because we bought our own home after that, I had my own room, and eventually I had friends who I saw everyday. having been born in 96, I imagine most of these memories are from between 2000-2004. I remember playing with them on our street, riding our bikes up and down, always daring eachother to go into this abondeded old pink house. One of my friends had a bunch of chickens in his backyard which was really weird for the area we lived in. We always did everything outside. Even if we were playing pokemon on our Gameboy's, it was outside on the street curb where skin-crawlingly long earthworms could slither out from the ground at any moment.

My first game console was a Gamecube. It came with super mario sunshine and we used to gather round the gamecube and play it. Then I got the legend of zelda the windwaker. I'll never forget the countless hours that my dad and I spent together, I could barely read yet so everytime dialogue came up on the screen he would make me read it, if I wasn't good enough he made me read it again and if I skipped it . . . lol I knew not to skip it.

After a few years in New Milford, my parent's career's managed to push further. My dad was now the Director of IT where he worked and my mother was the Director of HR and as a result of their hard work, they got to live the American dream. They had another kid, my brother, and moved to a town called Hillsdale when I was 6 years old and about to enter 2nd grade. It was strange, I lost all my friends, I had to make new ones. I tried very hard, too hard. I lost sight of who I was very quickly and before I had even finnished elementery school, I had an identity crisis that probably to this day remains an enigma.

I remember the days where my only friend was my gamecube. I had a copy of Tony Hawk Underground 2. To this day I really think that game was a lot of what was right with games back then. By to days standards, I'm not a gamer. To be honest, I get a little depressed when I see the directions games have gone in. The whole spirit that used to go with it, the magic, the emotional genuinuety is gone.

The paintball playing, skateboarding, adventerous crowd has been replaced by people who think of paintball as a good way to get hurt, see more value in learning how to "Quickscope" than how to learn a trick, and are too lazy and scared of everything to go out and explore the world.

Anyway, back to my life story. So there they were, in a nice neighborhood like they always wanted, living in the house they always hoped they could one day afford. Only it was only a matter of time until my mom got jealous of the neighbors. Jealousy turned into anger, and from her anger, she became short. Arguments became a daily occurrence. Her anger boiled into thick hate over the years until there was a constant tension in our home. My dad was forced out of his own home, people with the government tried to make me angry with him so I would side with my mom. They even tried to make him angry with me. Our family was oblierated. I watched my mom passibly lose her job and let the house that both their financial well being rested on forclose. They were supposed to sell it but when the government is making someone else pay for most of the utilities why bother? My father lived in a motel for months, and then in someone's back room. He spent all his money trying to get custody.

Someone very important to me once said, that when it comes to money, It's never enough. There will always be that little extra that you want- to take more. It's tear jerking to think back on what happened through that lens.

It took years before my Mother and I talked to eachother again. But we did. Even with a very limited circle of friends, I managed to have interesting times throughout highschool. We went on adventures, we knew the bad areas like the back of our hands. Ironically I was also the president of the AV club. And the school hired me to work an IT job over the summer. I even got a car and found a comfortable job delivering pizza with two bosses that I became very good friends with. But then I lost my car, through little fault of my own. And I lost my job, But I learned how to make Pizza's and my bosses have been making things difficult for themselves, literally organizing the whole schedule around me, letting me use their car to deliver with.

I think we all have a story to tell in life, there's a main reoccuring concept that everyone seems to have and it's normally unique to them. So there's a story in life that we are all meant to tell, and it;s up to us to decide what happens in the scenario that life puts us in. What will be the rest of my story? I don't know, There was a time when I was excited for it, there was a time where I feared it, There were even times where I thought I knew exactly what it was. But right now, I think it can go anywhere and maybe I need to stop worrying about what my story is, after all, I'm Brandon L, and whatever my story is in the end, I'm gonna make it amazing!

[Chief16]

Yeah. That was touching. There's always a story to tell.