Fourth grade is when I consider my life to have first started. Living with my grandparents put me back at Glen Allen Elementary school where I had gone for first grade. The majority of my old friends were there.. older.. but it was great to see a few familiar faces that recognized me as well. I came alive.. I got color in my skin, put on weight, got braces to straighten my teeth and really began to blossom. My grades came back up and I again was back on the high honor roll.


    My mother was allowed visits once every couple of weeks but she started showing up more and more often drunk or high and it would upset me to the point of total depression for a couple of days afterwards. I'd see her show up like that and I'd feel complete guilt for not being there to take care of her. My grandparents got permission from the court to tell my mother that she could only keep coming to see me if she got clean.. She didn't and eventually started coming less and less.. and then she just stopped. Her drugs meant more to her than her little girl and to this day it stabs my heart when I think about it...

    I completed fourth and fifth grade at Glen Allen Elementary.. I had many friends and a few cute little boyfriends.. Grant, Jeben and Paul. *g* I began to enjoy being a little girl. I didn't have to worry about holding anyone's hair back while they puked or cleaning up beer cans or hiding. I was able to go to school.. get good grades and just be a kid.


    I chose to homeschool myself through middle school using both Calvert and Cambridge schools. Those years flew by pretty quickly.. I made straight A's, without a teacher.. just me and a manual. :) I got my braces off, had let my hair grow out and with no word from my mother for four years.. I was doing and feeling pretty good. Tons of friends and loving grandparents. My aunt gave me a cat that I named Kelsey and we adopted a stray from a friend of the family that I named Buttons.

I started high school in 1997 at Hermitage High with my best friends and was able to be a normal teenager. I got good grades and started to develop my love of art.. and computers. I met a guy on the internet named Brandon. We became fast friends and were there for each other when we needed to get things off of our chests. He started dating a girl that made him the happiest I'd ever seen him but she was into drugs and he began tagging along to parties. At one party his girlfriend was raped in front of him.. but because he was so high he could do nothing to help her. A week later his mother shot herself and it was all that he could take. He hung himself a couple of weeks later on Easter weekend.


    While I was still coping with Brandon's death, I lost three more important people.. my favorite uncle in a motorcycle accident, a family friend (also my dentist) to a heart attack, and another excellent guy friend to a drunken car accident on his birthday. It was a hard year for me. I was tormented with nightmares of seeing Brandon hanging from the ceiling at the end of my bed.. and replays of everyone's deaths. I eventually got up the nerve to visit the scene of Matt's accident and, in the middle of the night, crawled along the ground collecting broken glass from his windshield into my palm. I needed to have something of his to keep for my very own to make sure that I could keep his memory alive in my heart. For me, losing Matt wasn't just losing a friend, it was losing someone who I had dated off and on.. losing an unknown future with someone.. someone else who I could've saved had I been there when I should have.

    The following September Buttons dissappeared. It was about 5 weeks before Halloween, and being black, we assumed that she has been taken for sacrifice. Before Christmas Kelsey became suddenly ill with feline leukemia. She lost 8 pounds when she had only been 13 pounds to start with.. she couldn't walk.. wouldn't eat and we had to put her to sleep.


    During all of the constant loss I found one light at the end of the tunnel. His name was Kaleb. He was my first *real* relationship. I met him through my religious services. He lived two hours away in Winchester, Virginia so it was hard to see him but I fell for him like a load of bricks. My two best friends were dating his two best friends so we would frequently take weekends trips up there to visit. Kaleb and I went back and forth for a couple of years and then he went through a phase of lying and deceit and we broke up. I still cared for him but it just wasn't working anymore.

Shortly after my split with Kaleb, I rebounded and began dating a guy named Tom who I quickly found out was only after one thing - sex. I wasn't interested in taking that step with anyone and found that without the idea of sex, Tom wasn't interested in dating me. We made a mutual agreement to break up. I contacted Kaleb and we again, began talking. We got back together but it didn't last long because by then we had both grown up. We weren't the same kids that we had once been and he had several other girls that he was interested in and I already had my eye on another guy.. So again, we split.. this time for good.


    I began dating that other guy, John. We took trips to Virginia Beach together and had similar interests but when I was with him, he often treated me more as a trophy that a human. I quickly became repulsed by the soiled feeling it gave me. I broke up with him but quickly found companionship elsewhere with a guy named Richard, the guy that all the girls wanted.. He was a "bad boy". He raced motorcycles and bmx bikes. He had chains hanging from his pockets, metal studded belts, and black spikey hair. We were together for a few months but he began to be somewhat obsessive about our relationship. He started keeping an album of things that I had drawn for him.. used up pens that I gave him as a joke, and trash that I had given him to throw away. He was clingy and so suffocating that even my friends cringed when he came around.

    I had begun noticing a new guy who was actually friends with Richard, named Stephen, and who ended up being my way out of my relationship with Richard. Stephen and I had the same interests, the same sense of humor and we became unseparable. We were together for the summer after our Junior year and on through our graduation in 2001. I slowly began losing my friends because of him but didn't really care because we planned to attend college together and he was to be my future. My mother had also started calling to try and speak to me. I was afraid to answer the phone and was thrilled at every chance I had to leave the house.