All my life I've been taught to stay quite and not interupt when adults talk. Listen and be respectful to others that was expected from me. Though, it wasn't in my nature to stay quite therefore I invented my own little dream world.
The story begins in a town where things never seemed to change. Growing up in a single home with one bedroom to share with my parents, I was raised without any sisters or brothers. Never having to share toys was great but I knew in the back of my head that there was always something missing. I had a normal childhood many people would say but I realize now that it wasn't anything like that at all. My dad was raised very strictly even for German standards. He always had this huge passion for music and would listen with his headphones on a radio station and record songs he thought were cool for their time. My mom I always remembered as quite and caring, making sure I always had food and clean clothing. It's hard for me to remember when she smiled but sometimes we had neighbors come over and they would have party's on the weekends. Each year when summer approached my dad would take us to this Island camping for many summer month until it stopped and it was time for me to go to school.That's when my mom was happy. There are a lot of hidden layers to my mom which I didn't discover until very much later when I was much older. You could say my parents were a normal couple with fights and arguments occasionally. I didn't understand what resentment was as a child and couldn't figure out why my parents would have all these fights all the time which got worse the older I became. Sometimes they would fight for hours or days but would always somehow manage to make it through and not give up. I admire that a lot but sometimes I feel that if I might have not been born they would have been happier. My dad was always the most adventurous and eager to explore new things. Summer was always his favorite, going to lakes and lay on the beach for hours. He taught me how to swim at a lake called Autobahn See, naturally it was near a busy Freeway and you could hear the trucks sometimes in the far distance. It was also my favorite time of the year. We had a dark red car, an Opel which was a pretty common car back in the days. My mom also told me that we had a Trabi, which we call in germany a paper car, which wasn't far off as it was made out of cheap materials. I should probably also mention that I grew up on the east side of Germany, I was born in the late 80s and the wall came down a couple of years later but still remained in many people's head til this day today. We would occasionally visit my grandparents, aunts and uncles. My favorite uncle until this day is Sigfried. He would live secluded from the town in a small garden house and sometimes we would go visit him on our way back from the lake. He'd always work on something in his garden house but never seemed to quite be able to finish it. He'd always offer us a Turkish coffee which basically was hot water with unfiltered coffee beans. In a lot of ways he reminds me of myself as we went through similar stories in life. My uncle seemed to have a very rebellious nature and growing up in East Germany wasn't necessarily something that fit in quite well. So he decided to what we call jump the wall to start a new life. He did so two times as he was missing his family the first time but decided to come back. He managed to come back the first time unharmed but the second time they caught him and threw him in jail for many years until Germany was united again. He never talks about those times but my dad would always talk abkut those glorious days he made his escape.
The older I became the more frequent we would visit my grandparents in a small village with no more than 500 people living in it. When my grandpa died these visits would become a lot more frequent and we would stay almost every weekend with my grandma now. Until one day my mother sat me down and told me that we were going to move to grandma's. I was in 4th Grade when it happened. My life as I knew it was going to be over and there was nothing I could have done to change it. In a matter of a couple of month I've lost my friends and moved to this strange new place, to live with my grandmother. Things were about to get even worse when the kids in school did not like someone who came from a big city. My first day already started off as the worst day of my young life. I was sitting in the back of the classroom when two boys from the front seemed to fight about a backpack and it eventually landed on my table. My natural instinct was to defend this poor guy who was being bullied and gave him back his stuff. I used to have a lot of friends back in my hometown and I used to be somewhat of the class clown nobody ever was mean or disliked me.
Story to be continued....