Life Is a Lot More Beautiful After Some Bad Luck

I'm eleven years old. Behind a wooden shelf in my school's library is a section in which the books are not allowed to be accessed until one is in the Sixth Grade. I am in the Fifth Grade. Everyone has a reading partner but me. No one is looking. I quietly walk behind the wooden shelf and quickly skim the titles. A red, white, and black tome catches my attention. "Please Kill Me: An Oral History of Punk Rock". I take the book off the shelf and suck my stomach in to make room to shove it down my khaki pants. I pull my oversized school uniform shirt over it, and ask if I can go to the bathroom. This book is still in my possession today.

I'm thirteen years old. I have now discovered that punk is not an antiquity, remembered only in its artifacts, but a still pulsing, living, partying entity. There is a certain blue-eyed, mohawked boy that plagues my thirteen-year thoughts. My clothes are now reminiscent of those worn in the grainy black-and-white pictures in Please Kill Me. Thrift stores were my store of choice. I wander around the East Village looking for my friends-- friends whom my admiration for often blurs into intimidation. They introduce me to alcohol, and there is an instant spark between the two of us. I still attend the private Christian school who's library I (permanently) borrowed that book from. I am torn between two worlds, and I can feel one constantly increasing its pull.

I'm fourteen years old. It is my last year of middle school. I have now initiated my on-again, off-again pattern of consuming alcohol daily. I have started to attend punk shows, the pulse of angry upbeat riffs and fastloud drums throbbing through my body, giving it life I'd never known before. It's been a year of me immersing myself in this culture, and it already feels like home. I meet four girls who will become my best friends for the next four years. We wander around the streets of the East Village together in the heat of summer, sipping sugary caffeinated booze, eating the occasional free painkiller or benzo, letting our young lips meet with whichever babyfaced squatter boy's the alcohol told them to.

I'm fifteen years old. It is my first year of high school. I start volunteering at an old punk house called ABC No Rio. It's located just downtown of the East Village, and they have matinee shows every Saturday. I have been to a few shows here in the past, but I have just now gained the confidence to volunteer here. I meet a boy there. His name is Arvid. He goes to school downtown and is only a year older than me. I spend this year with him, exploring downtown Manhattan, trekking through snowy sidewalks at 10 PM to do graffiti, smoking pot with his rich prep school friends who can afford to buy it. I start listening to black metal, and it instantly grabs ahold of my heart. My friends at ABC No Rio help me start my dreadlocks. The color of the clothes in my closet darkens to blacks and browns. I feel my life starting to begin.

I'm sixteen years old. It's my second year of high school. I start dating a boy with whom I have had a ever-fluxing relationship with for the past two years. He is a pothead, and soon, so am I. But despite the ever-growing presence weed has in my life, I continue to do well at my fancy private school. In fact, I do better than ever, bringing up anarchism-based counter arguments to ignorant opinions uttered by the over-privileged of my classmates, constantly challenging the school administration's seemingly unjust choices that everyone else only dared to murmur about, and devoting all of my spare time spent in school towards art. But this is the year the uglier side of life begins to reveal itself to me. By the end of springtime, I am expelled from school and I am in an abusive relationship. I contemplate suicide multiple times that summer. In early September I am arrested and charged with possession of drugs that are not mine. I have to start passing court-mandated drug tests, which makes me realize how much of a drug addict I really am. By the time the fall comes, I look in the mirror and I can barely recognize myself. I am broken.

I'm seventeen years old. I now go to an alternative high school, where credits are earned based on a pass-fail system of internships and extremely simplified classes. An old friend reappears in the city, seemingly blessed with a fate a thousandfold better than his heroin-addict past and my bleak and numbing present. He's in New York on business, selling pot he's been sent from his home on the west coast, and I help him get rid of his product. The problems cluttering my past seem fast-fading. By the time he goes back to California, he has taken my heart with him. I manage to finish two years worth of school work in only one, an extremely stressful endeavor conquered only by the thought of never having to be away from Brian again once it was finished. I move to California to be with him, only to be met with coldness and irrationality from much of my surrounding environment. By the time the summer is over, I know to never trust anyone fully again. But I also now know that, in some strange ways, life is a lot more beautiful after some bad luck.