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Short stories: Life lessons

by Douglas Moore

Created on: July 28, 2007

Walking Away

I always felt like crying. Deep down.

My name is Jason. My friends call me Jay. I am 14 years old. Maybe I'm too young to have thoughts and feelings, too young to have an opinion that matters much.

My days used to be spent in worry. An overbearing cloud of angst and depression were part of me. I couldn't always point to the source of my sadness. Maybe my subconscious mind was preparing me for the worst so that when the inevitable occurred, I would not be crushed to dust.



Things were quite fine until my mother died when I was seven. I miss her so much. Sometimes I think I aggrandize her memory because she is gone; people always speak well of the dead it seems. She was everything that a boy would want a mother to be: loving, thoughtful, and always there to make the hurt disappear. Her smile is impressed upon my mind for all time and I still talk to her at night when I have no one else, which is every night. Her name was Rose. That's a beautiful name isn't it? Aunt Grace bought me an acrylic ball with a rose in the middle after Mom died. It's on my dresser right now.

You may ask yourself how a fourteen year old boy could be writing this. Reading is my escape from everything and from reading I have learned when to use the right words at the right time. Writing's my door out, until I am eighteen. Then I don't know what I will do, but I will be free, and that's all that matters to me. I don't want to hurt anybody; I just want to be free.

In the morning, while preparing for school, I was always very quiet so that I didn't wake my step mother. My father married her a year ago. I know that my father was lonely and this woman gave him attention but I can't stand her. She doesn't have any children but I'd always wished that she did, if only to dilute her wrath. Dad was always at work really early, but she didn't have to go to work until 9 o'clock, so she slept in.

Hmm. What about breakfast? Mary , my step mother, made sure to buy the most tasteless stuff she could find. You know, the stuff the looks like a bowl-full of twigs. She told me to sprinkle some wheat germ on top of it. It tasted even worse.

I always hurried in the morning, carrying my backpack full of the schoolwork I didn't finish. I just couldn't bring myself to do it most days. Outside, I usually met John while he waited for the bus. He's older than me and really smart. He lives with a stable family;he, his two sisters, and brother. He's kind of a jerk though, because he senses my problems and knows

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