I started off my sixteenth year with a blowjob from a girl I had never met before. I’m not quite sure how it happened. She had found out it was my birthday, and I guess she wanted to give me a gift. I cherished it greatly.

Later that night I walked home. It was quiet. The floorboards creaked beneath my feet. From further down the hall, in the room across from mine, a lump lay on a mattress underneath a thin bedcover.

A few months passed. I got my license, and was given the family’s old green minivan. Some say it was blue. Let’s just call it teal. I would drive it all over town.

I spent my morning’s before school shaking my father awake. Sometimes I would try to drag him out of bed. He was worse in the mornings, while I was worse at nights. Together, we made a complete happy person.

I started to date a girl who was more interested in having her skin wounded than caressed. I did not know why everyone around me was so sad.

My mother once told me that we surround ourselves with what we most manifest. She could no longer remind me of this. I had to remember for myself.

My father stood at the doorway of my bedroom. He told me his life insurance plan would leave over a million dollars to my name. He had thought it through very carefully.

We rode in the teal minivan down the street so that he could speak with my friend’s mother. I dropped him off, then left to pick up milk from the local convenience store. I drove all over town.

I ended up parked on the side of the road. My arms were too tense to grasp the steering wheel. I lay in the backseat, my body shaking.

My father once told me that some people are not meant to go through life alone. That he needed somebody. I hopped in the teal minivan, and drove all over town.

Later that year I was later honored as an All-Conference track athlete at my high school. I was good at running. I did it a lot.

It was one of those times in February when it was way warmer than it should have been for that time of year. The kind of weather that pops out of nowhere for a day or two, you enjoy for a little, and then hope it goes away because global warming is a huge threat to humanity. That kind of weather.

It was nighttime, and we sat in her hot tub underneath the stars as I rambled on about my life dreams like I always do. She was always good at listening to me, regardless of how crazy I sounded or how long I talked about all the things I wanted to accomplish with my life.

“…and I’m gonna have to make sure that we can get done filming that by the second week of June, because that’s when a lot of people are going to start work and then we’d never have time to get everyone together to finish filming. If we don’t get it done then, we’re totally screwed.”

I fell silent for a moment as my mind jumped to all different places. Filming. Writing. A song that came on the radio on the way to her house that I thought she might like. A weird conversation I heard between two people at the coffee shop on Main Street the day before. I finally stuck a landing on a topic.

“I also really wanna release a music album one day.”

I took a moment to think about how ridiculous that must’ve been for her to hear. She’s known me for two years, and never once have I shown any interest in creating music. I was a writer. A filmmaker. I chuckled to myself.

“No, don’t laugh,” she said to me. “You can do that. You can do anything you want to do.”

And then I stopped, and I looked at her. The genuine sparkle hidden in those soft, brown eyes. The unfeigned confidence in her tone of voice. And that was when I had one of the greatest realizations I’ve ever had in my life.

I can.