Road Trip [#Wattys2015]

Chapter 1

Road trip

Chapter 1

Beeeep

My alarm o'clock went off. In all my seventeen years in this universe no sound has ever annoyed me more than that.

Beeeeeeeeeeep

It went again, louder this time. As if we were having an argument and it was fighting back. As if it was disagreeing with me and yelling at me to get its point across. And in some ways, that was kind of what was happening.

Beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep

You wanna fight as hole, let's go! I raised a hand out of the warm sheets and slammed on the off button way to hard, the alarm o'clock didn't only shut, but it fell off the desk as well. "Only a gentle push, that'll do it." The sales woman had said to me and my mother the day we went out to buy it. I was only eight years old then, which meant that I had the same shity alarm o'clock for nine years.

I snapped of my bed in realization, that my rule, my only rule had been broken. The rule was that I keep no object, no matter how much I like it or how useful it is, for over 5 years. My mom kept telling me how stupid this rule was and how much it would cost her to replace all of my objects every five years. So I promised her that she wouldn't have to and that this rule was stupid anyway. I only promised her that because she would never get on board with me no matter how many times I explained it, so I managed to break or ruin every of my objects after I closed exactly five years with them. I even had a hidden notebook in which I noted the dates of everything I bought, just to make sure I wouldn't forget.

My favorite rule, the one that had defined my life had been broken and by what? A stupid, annoying alarm o'clock that I hated from the very first minute. I had created that rule when I was nine (which is a year after I bought the stupid alarm o'clock so that explains why it hadn't been noted down) and I only created it because of a story I heard on the news. It was a man that was married to a woman, and they had a lamp for over five years. When the couple got divorced the only thing this man wanted from his wife was the lamp. He moved in a house with it and apparently had some kind of friendship with it. Then one day he dropped it and it broke, he fell into deep depression over it and tried to take his own life away. He was hospitalized after that because he had some kind of mental disorder and I don't know what's happening to him now but what I do know is that, in his room in the hospital he's in, they have no lamps.

Now of course, I didn't think that I would befriend an object and end up like him if I held it for over five years, but his story made me realize hoe disturbingly clingy people are. Not only with objects but also with people and even life styles, you know the so-called routines. I decided that day that I wouldn't be one of those people; I wouldn't get attached to anything and anyone, ever. Maia, my best friend's sister, took a romantic twist to it as always. "What if you fall in love?" she had asked me when I was explaining this rule to her and Jackson. I had a whole different theory for love to, but instead of getting into that mess I decided to answer her question with one simple phrase. "I'll do my best not to."

Love is nothing but an advertisement that was my theory. An advertisement to sell books, movies, songs, or anything else that made it look like the best thing in the world. It made people think that it was the purpose of life and they wasted it trying to find it. Some people thought they did and got married, but they either ended up divorced like my parents, or stayed together forever in order to raise their kids but the spark was gone. Some other people never found it, and I don't think they ever even looked. Those people were considered losers but to me they were the only winners. Because they didn't give in the pressure that society puts on every human being to get married. They were not only strong enough to take the criticism from everyone around them and also strong enough to depend on themselves for everything not another human being.

And, don't get me wrong it is convenient to live with someone, raise kids together, splitting the house choirs and making the do the ones you can't stand and in return you do the ones they can't stand. So if you want a family "love" is the way to go, but I don't. And I don't want a steady home either. I want to become a journalist and publish the stories of the world's most mentally disturbed freaks like the guy with the lamp.

I pulled the curtains and light filled the room, I was pleasantly surprised to find that the alarm o'clock was lying broken on my wooden floor. It looked defeated with its accessories circling it, creating a lake around it. Like an animal that has been run over by a car. "Mom, my alarm o'clock broke!" I yelled as I put on a pair of blue jeans and a plain red hoodie. I walked out of my room and headed towards the kitchen were my mom was running up and down trying to get every job done before heading off to work. "Its okay honey, I'll get you a new one now go! You're late!" She spoke anxiously and fast like every morning. I grabbed a donut from the fridge and left while saying buy with a mouthful of it, and headed to school.