People are nothing like books. Unfortunately, it took my mother’s death, 2.76 years ago, to realise that. You see, there isn’t always a plot that makes sense, or the ending to match what happened. Real life doesn’t give you a fork in the road and tell you the path that leads to the perfect life, or the one that you wanted. It takes real chance, good luck, or vast amounts of knowledge, to know exactly what would happen on each path. Rocky, or sandy, or even the yellow-brick-road path doesn’t open itself up to you, but instead, you have to wade it out whatever happens on the one you choose.

People tell me it wasn’t my fault. That my mom died, I mean. But it was, or at least a combination of many people’s decisions and the forks along the way that lead to her dying. Think about it, if Dorothy’s parents decided to marry a smart person, maybe she wouldn’t be such a total ding ding and wouldn’t go after Toto, during a tornado, and she would be safe, and not somewhere off in la-la land. She wouldn’t be melting witches with water, and going off on adventures with lions and sparkling shoes on her feet that could have taken her home the instant she put them on.

My mom’s death was similar to Dorothy’s adventures in Oz due to the many choices that could have led her to not be dead now. If her mom didn’t choose a certain college for her to go to, her professors might have put my mom in a separate art class from my dad, where they instantly fell in love, and had a child, me, who one day would ask her mom to buy her goldfish from the gas station with the hot air balloon out front. My mom would have been home safe, and I wouldn’t be eating goldfish at her funeral.

My aunt yelled at me that day, screaming that I didn’t need goldfish, but I was eight and didn’t know that, and she was ignorant and upset over the death of her sister and didn’t care. I ran out of Quinn’s Funeral Home for the Deceased, which I now realise is redundant, and hid in the closet of my best friend Becky’s room, who then was the one screaming because I was hiding in her closet blowing my nose in her communion dress, but I was eight and upset over the death of my mother and really didn’t care. Her mom ran upstairs and coddled me until I stopped crying and screaming, and until my dad came and brought me home.

But the point of this story isn’t that I’m a severely depressed twelve and a half-year-old, with a horrible life, who thinks about how her mother died because of a very drunk truck driver, going in the wrong direction at 6 o’clock at night, on the same road my mom had taken to bring me home a snack sized package of goldfish from the gas station with the hot air balloon in the front, because it’s not entirely true. Yes I miss my mom, but I only think about it when I’m alone at night in my bed snuggling in the blanket, that she stitched for me when I was six, that’s too small, so my feet stick out at the end in a way that makes my dad laugh, because I wake up every morning snuggling with my freezing feet. I don’t sleep with any other blanket all the same, though. I don’t have my dad wash it every week like he does my clothes and pillow cases, because it might smudge her signature done in navy blue sharpie at the bottom left blanket next to the bear hugging the moon, that I had learned wasn’t made of cheese.

The real point of this piece of writing, is to change the thoughts of many people in this world. That people are not in fact a book, but instead a series of forks and thousands of choices to lead to their end. Their lives don’t always make sense, and don’t always have the ending that matches what happened in their eventful life. I want people to realise that before reading more about my life in the lines that follow. I hope I’ve changed the way you think, and enjoy the rest of what my dad says are the typical months that follow a girl’s mother’s death. I hope that all made sense, because it does to me, and I so badly want to be like everybody else, though I know it’s impossible, because I chose the different path on my fork.