I groan as I receive my essay prompt for history. We're learning about how to write a CCOT (Continuity and Change Over Time) essay to prepare for the AP test coming up in three months.

From the day you were born to present day, what changed in your life and what stayed the same?

I sigh in relief,  glad that we're writing about ourselves instead of Mesopotamia or the Silla period or something like that because frankly, I balls at history.

My teacher instructs us to create a graph and so I do. I smile while thinking about my childhood and laugh lightly when the memories flow through my head. I was really hard to deal with.

I remember how I would sleep on the stairs. I remember how I would fight with my brother about watching the Powerpuff Girls or Power Rangers. I remember how I almost drank a bottle of bleach.

I remember my imaginary friend, Jongin. I remember complaining to him about my grade one teacher. I remember showing him every dance I learned at dance class. Then, I remember realizing that he wasn't real in the first place. The kid I had a crush on in grade two made fun of me for talking to myself and when I said that I was talking to Jongin, he laughed at me. That's when I realized he wasn't real.

It's funny how children's minds work. They believe in anything—Santa, the tooth fairy, dragons, vampires, and all that fantasy . Children's imaginations are full of sparkles and rainbows and unicorns that poop sparkles and rainbows.

I kind of wish that innocence and imagination don't fade as we get older. I wish that us teenagers had less work and more thinking. More, you know, doing.

Unfortunately, school exists.



"Hey, wanna go to Starbucks?" Jaekyung, my best friend from grade two, comes up to my desk right after the bell rang for the end of the day. I nod, "I could use a nice frappucino. History tires me and makes me want to shoot myself."

Jaekyung laughs at me, “When does it not?” I grab my stuff while laughing at her statement, because she’s right. The both of us shuffle out of the hell hole called school.

And so here we are, sitting at a corner table in Starbucks. We talk about our day and what dress Jaekyung's planning to wear for prom. She tries to convince me to go to prom with her boyfriend's best friend, Daehyun, but I refuse. Don't get me wrong, Daehyun's hot as hell, but prom just isnt my thing because 1) dresses aren't for me and 2) being in a room full of people from school makes me want to vomit. Jaekyung pouts and takes a sip of her iced green tea. "Just think about it, okay?"

I reply with the world’s hugest sigh, "Okay."

I don't think about it. Things like prom makes me sick enough that thinking about it makes me want to vomit.

My mom calls me, urging me to go to the market. I say goodbye to Jaekyung, leaving the store. I sip up the rest of my frappe and throw it into the nearest trash can when I'm through with it. It was probably a bad idea, since I threw the cup too far. I think it’s going to miss, but no. Something changes the cup's direction and it successfully enters the garbage bin. Strange. I'm positive that the empty cup was way too far to the right to be able to make the cut.

Brushing off the thought, I walk into the market to search for my mother's necessities.

Once getting all of the groceries, I wait patiently in line for the cashier. Finally, the previous person pays and takes off. The cashier asks me how I am today while scanning the goods and placing them into plastic bags. A minute passes and she tells me to pay, and I do so with my handy-dandy credit card that my parents thankfully entrusted me on.

The cashier hands me my goods, says goodbye, and oh, how sweet of me to make quick trips to the market for my family!

I walk to my house holding heavy bags in both of my hands. My shoulders hurt from being weighed down by the groceries, so I decide to take a break and sit on a bench at a park near my house. It’s these times where I wish my brother was home so he could drive me. Or I could just get my own license. I roll my shoulders around, releasing the tension created from the heaviness of the goods.

My hand accidentally hits one of the bags. The bag flings to the side of the bench and I think it's going to fall off the edge but instead, half of it stays on the wood. It looks like it's being held up by something, but I just shrug.

Mysterious things like these happen often. One day, I put down my pen and onto my notebook. It rolled to the side of the desk, but abruptly stopped after being a hair away from falling onto the school floor. Similar things happen with colored pencils, strips of lead for my mechanical pencil, etc. The trash and grocery incident is no different.

I like to think that I'm just a lucky person. Or maybe that's just what I want to think.

I wanted to put this up as soon as I could, thus making this chapter short. This chapter is basically like the prologue/introduction, so trust me, the real chapters are going to be much longer than this!!

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