I am now in my fourteenth year, and life was seemingly getting back to normal,

Normal for the way my life had tracked so far anyways.

I am now back into the public school system,

And I find it has changed dramatically,

and so have my friends.

I had but one friend that had stayed with me,

Enduring the years of little contact and not knowing.

And through it all,

She remained strong and always had everlasting faith in my soul.

Her name is Sarah McDougal,

And she is my friend to his day.

The many friends that I had before my years at SEK Academy had all moved on,

Could not care less about where I was,

Or how I was doing.

I started back late in m y freshmen year, and was operating under a naivety that was still their from childhood,

The belief that even as we grow older, the world and the people in it does not change.

I was dead wrong in believing that,

And I paid the ultimate price for that childish mindframe.

I found my one true gift early in my sophomore year in high school,

And that gift was the ability to write,

And write well.

And write I did,

And by the time I was eighteen, I had a collection of over two0hundred poems I had written,

From my starting, which was rhyme verse,

To my evennow writing style,

Traditional free verse.

It was the one thing that always calmed my spirit,

And made me feel better about who I was,

And what I was about. I was now an adult,

And once again, I had stayed strong,

And rose above and persevered.