The Day My Life Took a Turn | Teen Ink

The Day My Life Took a Turn

May 19, 2017
By TheTurtleKing BRONZE, Cave Creek, Arizona
TheTurtleKing BRONZE, Cave Creek, Arizona
1 article 0 photos 0 comments

I remember walking down to the school office, since they called me in there. I wasn’t quite sure why, as I was already in there earlier that morning. When I entered the office I saw my mom there talking to the administrative assistant. My mom looked at me and smiled.


“Hi Trevor, how’s your day going so far?”


“It’s going alright. What’s going on here?”


“Well, today is going to be your last day here.”


The moment she said that, I was paralyzed. I knew why I wasn’t going to come back. My mom and dad have talked to me and my brother about how if my dad got a promotion, we’d have to move to Arizona. I hated the idea. I’ve moved before, but never so far away. From where I lived there, family was only an hour away and I couldn’t imagine being away from them. At least in Utah, we’d go down there almost every Sunday, but I knew that wasn’t going to happen anymore.


     I knew that I wouldn’t get to see my friends for a long time, and I just felt my heart sink. I hid all these emotions and thoughts by simply giving a slight nod and said, “Okay” trying not to seem too upset. My mom handed me a pink piece of paper which had a spot for each teacher to put down my grade in each class. I took it and looked at it before looking back up to her.


“What’s this?”


“Just something you need to have your teachers fill out, have them put your grade and their initials down.”
I nodded and forced myself to smile a little. I didn’t really know what to say, and if I did I wouldn’t have been able to. I felt like I swallowed my tongue and couldn’t speak.
“I’ll be sure to do that.”


I walked out of the front office and started heading back to the art room. As I walked down the hall, I felt like nothing was right in the world. When I finally reached the stairs to the art room, each step felt like the pieces to my shattered heart were falling off. I had such high hopes, my dad even told me he was most likely not going to get the promotion. I was used to the cold, I couldn’t bare the thought of 102 degree weather. Before I walked into the art room, I put on a face that I had left with. One that made it seem like everything was okay.
I spent that lunch with a friend of mine, Kira, who I’ve spent most my lunches with since we never actually ate lunch. Kira and I were close. We met in fifth grade and were best friends ever since. However, that day was different. I wanted to spend the lunch with all my friends, but they were all in the cafeteria and if I went in there I would be dragged somewhere else to do my missing work. I would have went there if it wasn’t my last day. I figured since it was my last day, I’d do what I wanted to that lunch. Kira and I sat outside, since hardly anyone was out there. It was December, and kind of cold out. I told her it was my last day and from what I could tell, she was just as happy as I was about it.  Because of how close we were, we both knew that neither of us wanted to really go into detail about the whole thing, so we just acted like it was a normal day: goofing around, making jokes, and having fun.


After a while, we went back inside and waited in the library for all my other friends, as that was where we all met. When they finally came, I told them the news. I don’t remember all the reactions, but one reaction I remember well. It was my best friend Kc’s reaction. Kc and I had known eachother since the second grade and were like family. After I told her, I could tell on her face she wanted to cry, which only made me feel worse. She hugged me tightly and told me to text her often. This reaction is what made it harder for me when I finally lost her forever.


The following Monday, my mom, little sister, and I started the long drive to Arizona. We stopped in Nevada and stayed at a hotel called The Casa Blanca.  I ran out of medication for my ADHD the day before, so I didn’t act the way I really felt. I was hyper, overly excited, but deep down I was crying. I hated spending six hours in the car driving farther away from my friends and family. The next day we started driving again, and when we finally got to the house I was running around on account of being hyper and distracted, but when I finally got my medication again, every bit of sadness that I didn’t show hit me at once. I didn’t want to be there. I wanted to be back in Utah, where I was happy.


I was thankful that we would be busy most of the day, shopping or setting stuff up with the new house. It kept me distracted. It also helped to be unpacking when the movers finally came to drop our stuff off; however, going back to school didn’t do me any good when it came to my mental state. I often just put on a face that looked like there was nothing wrong so I would stop getting weird looks. I sat in the corner of the classroom mostly, it helped to go unnoticed. I had this strong desire to not have a lot of friends, as they might keep me in Arizona. In result, I had no one to talk to and usually would end up crying, whether it be on the inside or outside. Eventually I held back my tears for so long it became instinct for me to hold them back whenever I feel like crying. So now, instead of crying I just get a painful, scratchy feeling in my throat and a choppy voice whenever I try to speak. I never thought that I would miss crying as much as I do.


After the school year, things weren’t much better. Being from northern Utah, an Arizona summer was like being on fire. I could never really get comfortable, which only made me hate Arizona even more. We didn’t have a pool at the time, so I ended up staying inside the whole summer. We had also put my grandmother into a nursing home earlier in the summer, since she was bedridden and we simply couldn’t take care of her anymore. She had been bedridden for a couple years, and she had been living with us. She used a bell to get our attention whenever she needed something, usually I would be the one to get it when my parents left as I’d be the only one home. However, late that summer she unfortunately passed away and we had to drive down to Utah for the funeral. It was held in Utah so she could be buried with my grandpa.


Because of the funeral I missed the first two days of school, but it wasn’t the same school I went to just a few months earlier. It was a much smaller school than that one. The school was called, Foothills Academy College Prep. When I first got there, I met lots of great people, most of the students were really nice. I tried to keep my idea that if I didn’t make friends, there’d be nothing keeping me from going back to Utah; however, when you’re a lonely, depressed kid surrounded by nice people, you tend to make friends for your own mental stability. But I wasn’t just depressed and lonely, no, I felt broken. My mental state felt like dust and my stomach kept feeling like it was a black hole, pulling itself in. At least, until I met my friends I have today. At the time, I only had a few friends. I tried to keep it that way, but failed. I liked feeling good again. Sure, it was nothing like how I felt in Utah, but it was an improvement to the darkness that shrouded me every day I’d been in the hot wasteland.  However, this darkness came back later on in that year as a lot of my friends from Utah just simply stopped talking to me. There were still a few, Kc and Kira mostly, who stayed in touch as often as they could. Once again, I tried to hide it, but someone saw through my disguise. It was this person that helped me out of the dark. I’m so thankful that I met her; if it wasn’t for her, I’m not exactly sure where I’d be.


The following school year started out great, my mental state was getting better due to the new friends that I had made. Pretty soon, these friends became like family to me. I still tried to keep in contact with my few friends from Utah, but eventually Kc would hardly answer. She always said that she was busy with homework and stuff when we did talk, which was believable as she always did try to do her best in school. But eventually, she just stopped talking to me, and for three months I tried sending her emails saying, “Hey, what’s going on?” or “Is everything okay?” It got to a point where I called one of my other friends who said that they had a class with her. I asked them if they could see what’s going on with her. The next day I called her.


“So, did you see what’s going on?”


“She said that she needed her space. Were you guys a thing?”


“No. She was a sister to me. What does she mean by that? We’re an entire state away!”


“I don’t know.”


“Alright well, thanks.”


I hung up the phone, feeling my throat itch, burn, and clog up. It was getting hard to breathe, and all I could think of was how she hugged me on that last day. I felt my heart snap loudly, and I slid down the wall, trying to cry, but nothing came out. So many questions were rushing through my head. Did I do something? What did she mean by needing her space? Why didn’t she just tell me? And no matter how hard I tried, what method I used to try and contact her, she never answered. Sometimes I wondered, and find myself still doing it, if she even remembers me. The more I tried, the more it felt like I was falling into a dark pit with no way out and no light to see.


The next few months were hard, as I wasn’t getting better. I would often find myself spending hours holding and looking at the gifts she had given me in earlier years. They were the few memories of a great friend that I once was. I could handle death, since death is natural, but when someone just leaves without reason or warning, that’s when it hurts me the most. That’s when I break down. It’s funny because when we first moved to Arizona, my mom asked me why I wanted to go back to Utah. I replied by saying that I missed my friends. She told me that friends don’t last forever and that most of my friends I’d keep would be from high school. I just didn’t want to believe it. Especially with the friends that I was close to, like Kc. Shortly after I lost Kc, I pretty much lost all my other Utah friends except for Kira, whom I still talk to today.


After the whole Kc incident things started to calm down a little. I’ve had a few outbreaks of depression, but it was never that big of a deal. Sure I’m still slightly damaged and broken, but now I have so many great people in my life. Even though I lost many things because of the move, I have also gained so much more. All my friends now are like family to me, and are better than the ones I had in Utah. This move has taught me many things: you don’t know what you have until it’s gone, people don’t last forever, and spend as much time with those you love as you can. You never know when they will leave.



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