Life is weird. Growing up in my neighborhood was a lot of fun, it was full of kids around my age so most of us grew up together. We all went to the same elementary school and took the school bus home. We played outside in our front yards after school and on the weekends. Our parents knew each other, they were the type of neighbors that we don’t see anymore. It was a simpler time. It amazes me how life plays out. I think the internet had a lot to do with killing my childhood friendships. We all still live on the same block but we don’t talk to each other. Middle school was the beginning of the end. We all went to different middle schools and made new friends. In middle school, I made friends that I would go on to keep for the past 7 years, who would’ve thought that my closest friends would be people that lived farther away than the friends I had on my block. (Joan Didion)
It was January 2018, a new year, a new me. I come home after school one afternoon, I see my mother and father in the living room. My mother tells me that my uncle died. It went in one ear and out the other, I was unphased, I snapped back into reality and consoled my mother as she began to cry. Family holds the number one spot on my priority list, I am extremely close to my immediate family. This year has taught me that life comes at you fast, I never believed it until it happened. When my uncle died, I felt nothing, not the heartless sort of nothing but the nothing where I couldn’t bring myself to cry or feel sadness. My uncle was a stranger to me, to my younger self he was someone I cared about. As the years went by so did my relationship with my uncle. The year before he died he reentered my life and I started talking to him again., but when he died, it was like a vaccination, it happened so suddenly that I guess I didn’t have time to react. After the death of my uncle, I started to see the effects it had on my family. My other uncle started visiting us more but that’s what amazed me the most, death brings about reflection in the living. My mother’s side of the family came to the realization that they weren’t as close as they used to be. (Lois Lowry)