Least Of All Me

Where I come from, teachers don’t make you do silly things. For some reason, my teacher gave me a journal. She says that writing about how you feel is just as important as any other type of writing. She says that writing about emotion and thought and your own life is, in a way, a story. You’re telling your own story, which counts. 

I don’t think it counts. 

I think it is silly. I think it’s an excuse for her to shop on her phone for half an hour each morning while we scribble a page’s worth of nonsense. 

Today’s prompt was: Tell me about your life. She isn’t reading these. She just wants us to write about ourselves because certainly, we must have a lot to write. My name is Tillie Lavigne, and I have nothing to say. About myself, that is. 

I moved to the small, resolute town of Lachlan a month ago and have never missed anything more in my life than the city. Everything here is tiny and fractured, from the cracks in the sidewalks to the STOP signs covered in stickers and Sharpie sketches.

My mother made us come here because she is thirty-four and getting divorced. When I asked her if it was a midlife crisis, she scoffed. “No, Tillie,” she said, “I just want a change. We need a change.” That was a lie, of course. I don’t need any changes. I was happy back home, and since coming here, my happiness has been destroyed. Ruined and shattered and stolen. 

My happiness can only be found in books and poetry and in my own writing. But not writing about myself. Stories, because stories are interesting and exciting and contain more multitudes than whatever life I am busy living. 

We came here during the first week of August when the sun was the highest and the hottest in the sky. We would drive and see kids in lakes, boys hanging from trees and couples darting out of drugstores at midnight, hand-in-hand. It almost made me want to become a child of Lachlan, dripping with lake water, covered in scratches as I emerged from a small, crumbling gas station during the dead of night, unwatched except for the gazes of the streetlights. 

Similar to the city, I think, only quieter. Everything here is so quiet. Sometimes, I can’t sleep because I need the cars and crashes, the noise that seems to keep the city’s lifeblood in its grip. 

I moved to Lachlan because my mother got divorced, and she didn’t know what else to do. Having a child at nineteen is difficult. I don’t doubt that. But instead of staying single and happy, my mother married my father. After that, there was about a year of peace before everything seemed to shatter. Like a picture falling from a wall. That was the nail in the coffin. That was the marriage between my parents. 

When the divorce was finalized, my mother wanted the kid and my father wanted the dog. Part of me was tempted to go with him if only to ruin his plan for a newer, better life with a newer, better model of a girlfriend. Part of me was tempted to ruin his chance at happiness, if only because he had ruined mine. My father had never cared much for me. But I hadn’t cared much for him, either, so I suppose I can’t complain. 

But not once had I imagined us leaving. 

My mother didn’t care much about how I felt on the matter. “Go pack,” she said, and that was that. “Go pack,” and we were gone. Lachlan isn’t how I expected it to be. It isn’t how I expected anything to be. It’s small and ugly and full of wild, reckless teenagers who drive down tall, narrow roads at midnight with the headlights off, screaming to whatever song is playing on the radio and practically begging for death. But for some reason, I picture Lachlan can become a home. 

For some reason, I was given this journal. Now, writing about myself is a story both boring and silly. It’s the story of a fifteen-year-old girl with too much freedom and a mother who cares not for herself, let alone her child. 

A part of me used to think bad decisions were a myth. 

The way I looked at it, every decision had some good qualities. This meant that in order to make a “bad decision,” you would need to come upon a crossroad and choose the path in which there were no bonuses. No bright, smiley outlooks. Every consequence would be dreary and terrible and you would have to live with the fact that you had—finally—made a bad decision. 

Bad decisions, I thought, must be hard to make. So many choices, so many possibilities. All of which contained at least one golden ray of sunlight that must not be forgotten. But then again, I hadn’t crossed the paths of any proclaimed “difficult” or “bad” decisions at the time. 

Life was easy until I moved to Lachlan. The small, resolute town held little interest for me, a self-alleged snotty girl from the city. Where my mother saw charm, I saw ugliness. Despite my hopes of seeing the brightness in Lachlan, I know the truth of what this is. A bad decision. Where I come from, decisions have bright sides. Even the bad ones.

Aristotle said, “In all things of nature there is something of the marvellous.” I fear he was wrong. In Lachlan, there is nothing but dusty roads and deep, tightly-woven forests. Windows are dark; no buildings glow at night. The kids are wild and strange and they get it from wild, strange parents. Everything here is different than back home. In fact, home and here are two foreign, distinct places. The old and the new are compiled by force into a mind that doesn't want to accept change. A mind that can't accept change. Aristotle was wrong. There isn’t anything marvellous in Lachlan.

Least of all myself.