Hey guys. This is a little different from my one piece fanfics. The writing is different, the plot, everything really. Its more of a "novel" im working on. Please enjoy and comments would be appreciated.
Not Guilty
Introduction
Only one month into my 18th year. That is how long it took to me to realize I was going nowhere in life. It seemed to me that by this age I would have everything figured out. Graduate High School, go to a good College, and get a job that made me happy as well as successful. It seemed that simple. SEEMED. That is the key word.
I wake up early yet again. It is 5:45 A.M., and my alarm is set for 6:30 to wake up for another mundane day of school. Why couldn’t I sleep? Was my subconscious truly in such despair that even an act as simple as “sleeping” became too difficult for me to accomplish? Or was my mind too wrapped up in life’s little worries that I could not sleep fully without thinking them over in my mind.
What “real” problems did I have? College-picking, relationship-salvaging, family-managing? For an 18 year old boy in the urban streets of Rockville Centre, New York, these were the REAL problems. It is laughable that those were the types of problems most High School seniors had to overcome. Life’s REAL problems, such as living and dying, were oblivious to many fresh minds leaving the High School life and entering the real world on their own.
But not to me. I had felt that I was “living” the way I wanted to. I only talked to the people I liked, did the things that appealed to me, and always felt an inner-disdain for things forced upon me, such as responsibility and the law. Only opportunities that I felt would benefit me were opportunities that I would undertake.
Textbooks define me as an “opportunist.” I know that because a year ago the dean of my school yelled that at me for convincing one of my fellow classmates into giving me their new nike “kicks” for answers to a test (The test was simply composed of questions from last year’s tests, which I had saved through my older sister who took these tests when she was a senior).
I admit, I don’t necessarily mind being able to take up opportunities that only benefit me. In this world, I have seen people step on others just to get ahead in life, only for a short while. I am merely following the flow of humanity, those who think of others only become disappointed and let-down. I have seen it many times myself. Whether it’s in movies, films or books, many characters that have lived for the sake of someone else have always had a more difficult and rigorous journey than they would have if they merely did what satisfied themselves only.
As for dying, well, I have only lost a few people in my life. Half of them died even before I was old enough to realize what “loss” and “tragedy” were. When I was at the age of 3, a small child with blonde curls barely capping the top of my infant head, my younger sister, Diana, died at the age of one. How she died my parents have still never told me, and to be honest, I never wanted to know.
I was only three, barely old enough to run and speak. I did not know my younger sister. One could even argue that I didn’t know anyone at that point in my life, even my parents. However, at the age of 9, my grandfather died. This death was one that I was completely aware of, emotionally and mentally.
But one can only, truly know what it is like to live when one has reached the other extreme, death. That may seem like a contradiction, to experience life is to have it end, but it can only be understood by someone that has been to that desolate state. Where life is over, dreams run out of oxygen, emotions and feelings run dry like water in the desert, death is such a place that even the worlds strongest or the world’s most courageous man would cower in fear if ever presented with their own mortality.
Yet I know what it is like, I have been to the place few to any people have ever been before. I have seen with my own two eyes what everyone wonders and rumors about- the realm of death. Why is that? The answer is quite simple –
I, Jake Turner, have died. Not once, but twice. This story is about the second time that I experienced that dark, lonely abyss.