There is a manilla folder somewhere buried in a box in Atlanta that holds paper creased down the middle with smudged words in pencil and a page number at the top. 6th grade was a weird transition period. Back then, I didn't worry about looking cool. I wore boys clothes, I sat in the front of the class. I daydreamed. I somehow managed to get good grades based on pure luck. My english teacher's name was Ms. Ingram. She was much like a grandmother, with a lot of indifference. It was her last year of teaching before retirement. In her class we read "A Wrinkle in Time." Well, not so much "read" as listened to an old cassette tape of a monotonous voice reading the book. I read the book about 7 pages ahead of the tape because I felt much better reading alone. We worked out of a small red vocabulary book, and I sat in the back of the class due to the alphabetical order of things. I would tear out a piece of notebook paper and write an entire page, then put it behind the others in order and fold it closed with a big teal paperclip that I have to this day somewhere in my dorm room. It was a story about an adventure in a world away from the one I was struggling through, with characters like myself in thought and action dealing with scenarios that were much more interesting than the ones in school. Page after page began to pile up. I stored them beside my bed on a teal nightstand each night. If I had an incredible idea I would turn on my light and write as fast as possible so I didn't lose where I wanted to go. Some of the pages are stained with water from biking home in the rain. The format is terrible, and the dialogue is messy, but it was my world.

At the end of my 6th grade year, people wrote in my yearbook about how they supported my writing and knew I would be published someday, possibly famous. And then, with everything, life got in the way. I became busy with band and tennis and homework. There was little time to spend writing whatever came to mind. I started losing my ability to daydream because of my mental and physical health, and all of the outward pressure. In 8th grade I still had the dream of going to the Iowa writers college and study creative writing. But then, life got in the way. I had to consider getting a job, life beyond high school and college, actually being able to sustain myself. The outside impacts were detrimental to my mind, and I was forced to look at reality for what it was; disappointing.