i grew up.

My childhood was the lowest point in my life. I was born into a cruel family, with no love left to give away. I grew up being told I was selfish, ignorant, irrational. As the years passed by I spent every breathing moment running from the haunting loneliness that ripped through my entire body, always a few steps behind.

The first angel that appeared in my life was my grandmother, Mary Reynolds. She was rarely around, living across the country, but it was enough. The only love I was ever shown was from her, and without that I perhaps would not have been here today. Time rolled by, and I began to see things I didn’t before. The unspoken drunkenness. The sporadic handfills of pills. And the same desperate grief that I had never recognized in anyone else the world except her. We were one in the same. She was trying her best in a world that had been so cruel to her, and I have never met a person more beautiful.

A few weeks before I turned 17, I met Natalia Ferrell. She was a senior at a neighboring high school. We were best friends in the ways you only see in the movies. Our pasts were heavy, but when we were together it seemed to dissipate. Her mom had passed from cancer a few months earlier. While I could not relate to her pain, I understood it, and that was all she needed. She was there through the first of my bipolar episodes. She watched me fall into addiction, a slave to tiny white bars, and helped me fight it with every ounce of mental strength she had left. She showed me that this life wasn’t such an impossible one to live. The last night I saw her, we had never felt closer. We stayed up for hours after the party ended, talking about everyone, everything, and life itself. She left my house that morning in my favorite tank top, still wearing it from the night before. Later that day, I began to receive strange texts from her. She spoke of ghosting everyone and running away together, getting an apartment away from our parents and peers, and finally finding happiness. An hour later I got sent a picture of a police report from 2018. With her face on it. Under the name Sarah Ferrell. Then an article, graduation pictures from 2017, stories of her impersonating UNC students. Her name was not Natalia. She was not 17. Her name was Sarah, the 22 year old. And just like that, she disappeared as quickly as she had appeared, and the next three sleepless nights were spent responding to the thousands of texts wanting to know how, what, why. And while I have no answers for any of this, I know she mourned the life she created for herself. She wished with every cell in her body for it to be real. She found happiness in the identity she created. And while it lasted, it was the most beautiful friendship I have ever experienced.

In march, I met a boy named Ayden Tise. He was basically my first everything. I went into it with slight disinterest. He was emotional, needy, with hovering parents. A cheater, who had been in and out of mental hospitals for years. He was a liability. And everyday I questioned what I was doing, but some unexplainable force pushed me forward. When I found out my parents had hired kidnappers to take me to a ranch in montana, I packed my things in trash bags, and wearing his green windbreaker, pockets filled with a knife and five thousand dollars -the entirety of my savings, I ran. I bought a car the next day, my name on the title. I moved to Raleigh, the city my friends resided in. Throughout all of it, he was by my side. And eventually the annoyance turned to love. It was intense, dangerous, toxic. I would sneak him out every night, and bring him to huge underground parties. That era of my life is remembered in flashes. Sirens, blinding lights, fast driving, sitting passenger, not knowing how drunk he was behind the wheel. The whole world spinning in circles until nothing was anything like the way it used to be. If we were going down, it was going to be together. Our nightlife was drastically different from who we were in the sunlight. Making cupcakes for his mom with him on mothers day. Playing soccer with his little sister while him and his dad looked under the hood of my car, saving me hundreds of dollars on a mechanic. The family I lost hope of having so long ago. And every time the stress would overwhelm me I would run to him, having no one else to turn to lost in a sea of teenage adults all just trying to make it. He was sheltered, and words couldn’t relay the lingering, heavy fear that maybe I would never make it out, condemned to a life of couch surfing and counting pennies, but he tried his best. It didn’t last forever. He was explosive, I was explosive, and perhaps we were doomed from the start. When things ended, he couldn’t handle it. Driving his car into a bridge in the pouring rain. When that didn't work, he went back to what he knew, overdosing on oxycodone. Somebody found him before it was too late, and he ended up in the hospital, for once again another round of rehab. He didn’t last long there, running away in the middle of the night. It was short lived, but for the few days he was gone I looked everywhere for him. Driving to all of our secret spots, hoping with everything in my soul that I would see him and make it all okay. I never found him. He got sent back a few days later. Everyday I wait for the day my phone will ring, and I will hear his voice again. “My feelings for you are unconditional”. That was the last thing he said to me. Everyday I wait to say it back.

When I was a kid I was certain that one day I was going to wake up, and things would finally be easy. That never happened. Life never stopped hitting me with train after train. They say when you’ve hit rock bottom, the only way out is up. But I don’t believe it. I’ve been free falling for so long there must be a hole at the other end, leading to the future that’s just waiting on me to arrive. My journey is far from over, but those three people had an impact I cannot find words for. And my feelings for them will always be, as Ayden said, unconditional.