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In the Past
This was written for class, and was supposed to mirror a main point from
one of the parables of the horrible book, The Joy Luck Club.
It was yesterday, when Alan was told that his parents were going to get a
divorce. He didn't understand what that meant at first, but his mom simply
said to him, "You'll never see your dad again." Alan became confused, and
wondered what he had done to make his dad not want to see him. Because he
was so young, at the age of 8, he had no way to express his sadness to anyone
except to cry himself to sleep.
Less than a week after his mother told him about the divorce, Alan and his
mom moved across the country. As if his parent's separation wasn't hard enough,
he had to cope with completely new surroundings. All that Alan wanted was
to be alone, and to accept that his life would never be the same again. He
thought constantly about how everything had changed: where his new home was,
the friends he would never see again, and so much more. Soon enough, he began
to blame all his sadness and anger on his father.
Alan was viewed by the other children at school as an outsider. He never
talked to anyone, participated in class, or even did anything but drown in
his misery during recess. His mind often wandered during class, thinking
time and time again about the drastic changes in his life. He didn't feel
comfortable being anywhere, except in his own dream world, where his life
was perfect again, before all the changes.
The image of his father, had warped into something evil. His father had become
the devil he cursed everyday before bed. As the days turned into months,
and the months into years, he came to the conclusion that he never really
knew his father. This man who came home everyday late at night, and never
spent any time with Alan, except a few hours, if that much, on the weekends.
Alan often asked himself "Who was this man?" Alan didn't even remember what
his father liked to do in his spare time, or even if he liked to eat any
of the foods Alan liked to eat. It was his mother who was the victim, and
the man he didn't even know was the person responsible for murdering who
Alan would have been some day. He could have been a successful businessman,
but instead he was a drunkard, at the age of 16. He often drank until he
was sick. The funny thing about it was that there wasn't any peer pressure
involved. Alan never had any friends, and was consumed by his hatred and
sadness, even after all the years that had passed.
Alan had distorted all the details of what the first 8 years of his life
had actually been like. All the memories of playing catch with his father
were gone. They were replaced with illusions of his father beating Alan with
the baseball bat that was used for batting the balls. He also replaced all
the memories of his father teaching Alan how to swim with his father trying
to drown him in the bathtub. His father became the worst man ever to live
in this world.
Alan never talked about any of these horrible thoughts with his mother. Alan's
twisted attitude towards life went mostly disregarded by his mother, because
she thought he was just "going through a phase." Not until Alan's mother
actually caught him with an empty bottle of vodka, did she have an epiphany
that her son truly had serious problems. It was after this event that Alan's
mother confessed to him that it wasn't true that his father did not want
to see him all those years, but rather that she had not allowed his father
to see Alan. It didn't matter at that point though; the mental damage had
already been done.
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