Another Note Concerning Finding Jane
This journal entry is going to be quite personal for me, just fyi. Today in Psychology, we were talking about psychological disorders and I couldn't help thinking back to when I entered myself into a mental hospital almost two years ago. Due to confidentiality, I can't say much about my visit, but something did hit me today about my time there and Finding Jane, something that I never really realized the connection to until just then. There was this boy there during the day while I was there. He was in some sort of out-patient program where he didn't have to stay at the hospital overnight, he just came during the day. He was sixteen, something I envied (I was barely fifteen, like not even a week). I never actually found out his name--I probably could have if I had asked--but we just called him Laryngitis, because he had the illness while he was there. I was at the hospital through Valentine's Day that year and one of my clearest memories of my visit was when they let us all write cards to our loved ones, since we weren't going to be able to see them. I sat at the same table as him, and saw that he was writing a card to his girlfriend. I casually asked him what her name was and how long they'd been going out. I didn't expect the answer he gave, me, though. Well, technically, he wrote it down on a separate sheet of paper (he couldn't talk because of the laryngitis). I don't remember her name, but I do remember that they had been going out for four years and he had gotten her an iPod for Valentine's Day. My heart melted. He smiled constantly when he was talking about her and it killed me that he was in this hospital, with me, and not with his family and her. Anyway, he was probably my closest guy friend there. I looked forward to seeing him every day; he always smiled at me and (somehow) we had decent conversations. Silly little fifteen-year-old me was jealous of his girlfriend. She seemed perfect, and she had the perfect boyfriend. I don't even remember the guy's name. For gosh sakes I don't even remember an ounce of what he looked like. Maybe it's because I want to put that part of my life out of my brain, I don't know. But what I do know is that was the moment I knew I wanted something special when it came to love, not just some silly high school romance. I wanted something real, something like him and his girlfriend had (because seriously, who starts going out when they are twelve and stays together for four years?). I don't know where he is now, I don't know if they're still together, but sitting in my Psychology class today, I realized that he is the perfect Alex Malone. I have a feeling I based Alex off of him in some way, shape, or form, without even realizing it. You know, I've heard that writers take qualities they see in other people and put that into their characters, but I never really believed it. I always thought that my mind created every little piece of every single character from scratch, just to make them the perfect character, but...that may not be it at all. This kid, whose name I never knew, whose voice I only heard in a slight whisper, whose face I cannot even remember, who I only spent five days with, had this huge impact on my life. That's crazy!
January 5th, 2011 at 11:03pm