Dear God, I Left Her When I Found Her

Its natural to wonder about your father. Especially if you've never met him. I have never known my mother, either. All my life I have lived in foster homes by the generosity of the family who had decided to take me in.

My name's Michelle Martinez, or Haner. Both of those last names are on my birth certificate. The one that i'm supposed to go by is Matinez. Martinez was my mother's last name. Of course, Haner is Brian "Synyster Gates" Haner.

The life I live is at my foster parent's home, Molly and James Hudson. We live in a middle class home in the suburbs in Huntington Beach, California. I love my foster parents to death and owe my good fortune and health to them for not letting me remain an orphan, but we have our differences.

Music is what I am made of. Split me open and you'll finfd a heart, spleen, butterflies, and musical notes. My whit Les Paul is my sibling since I have none. I had devoted my being to the instrument until I found friends during my freshman year at high school.

My friends were as weird as I am. As passionate about music as I am, too. We had morphed into a wanna-be band before the first semester was over.

We would skip almost all of our classes and be in the band room just rocking out. The music teacher, Coach Rawland, let us stay in there as long as we wanted.

Damien would take over the drums, Nathan the bass, and Tanya and I would be on the guitars. We had just molded together to form this thing that finally seemed to fit in.

We were missing only one thing: a singer. We spent our whole sophmore year searching for some one who fit the bill, but no dice.

finally around Christmas that year we rocked out "Jingle Bells", and Tanya sang. All of us had stopped playing to stare at Tanya unbelievingly. "What?" was all she could muster.

Long story short, and one particularly gruesone pillow fight later, we had out lead singer.

Alright, I should probably start on telling you about my never thought of father before I lose some of you people. I was a junior at Huntington High and it was a Friday night.

Our unofficial band had nailed a gig at Chain Reaction. It was a big deal for most bands, but not for us. The only thing bigger for us was the crowd and stage. We didn't care about popularity or any of that. We just wanted a place to let our souls free.

Tanya had been staying the night over at my house. We were going to have to sneak out of my house in order to make the gig. So we waited impatiently for Damien and Nathan to show up.

They finally did we headed off to Chain Reaction. Off to our biggest stage yet, and probably the biggest change of my life.