Little Birds

1. Metamorphosis

I always wanted to start over, you know?

I guess I was curious about the feeling of going somewhere new and being able to be myself to a bunch of strangers, and they would judge me because everyone does, but it wouldn't matter to me because their opinions would be meaningless like the furious wind that tries, pointlessly, to blow away a mountain. So I could be whoever I wanted, say whatever I wanted...To me, that was the definition of freedom, and today I recognise it was a bit shallow, but I was a kid back in those days.

I had always wanted to go to a place full of strangers, and new roads, where I could easily rewrite my story and become whoever I wanted without having to explain it to anyone. I craved a new life with no past, because there were things that I wanted to erase, things that I had done and said, decisions that I had made and I wanted them to be forgotten. I wanted ME to be forgotten.

I was sick of being who I was because who I was wasn't myself. Like I was trapped in someone else's story, and I had to play their role perfectly because when I got out of the screenplay, I was scolded and hurt. And there was no life behind the scenes...except for those tiny moments when I was alone in my room, listening to the same old rock songs and escaping the outer world.

Charlotte Galicia Grayson had always been the good girl. Always wearing the "right" clothes, always saying the "right words" of doing the "right" things. The girl that would say yes to anything no matter if she wanted to say no, the girl that would only say nice things to others because she thought she wasn't good enough to criticise anyone because she thought that maybe, people would love best someone who would never contradict them or would never say the truth they didn't want to hear and that's why, Charlotte Galicia Grayson wasn't alive.

I wasn't alive.

I was buried in my own mask.

I had played this role for so long that I didn't know who I was anymore. I worked hard to bury my emotions and tolerate everything from everyone. And that sucked. I was numb and I wanted to feel something.

That's why I wanted so badly a fresh start.

A metamorphosis.

Painfully, I couldn't take a plane and run away or drive a car across an endless road and get lost on the highway. That's why going to college in a different school was the beginning I could get for the moment.
My best friend wanted me to go to the same school she had picked, and she had spent months planning how our lives would be, just the way she wanted and at the place of her choice and that's why I had changed my mind at the last minute and selected a different school, a school where most of the students would be strangers to me. A school without her.

I hadn't told her. I had ignored her all summer and I hoped she was so mad at me that our friendship had died like the flowers die when autumn begins.

You may think I am a bad person, a cold person, a person who deserves no friends and probably I am, but if I aim to tell this story, I ought to tell it right. I won't paint myself as the sweet, perfect and always right main character you may be used to, cause the truth is that I am guilty of making mistakes, of having felt horrible and wrong things and I'm not ashamed of it because I'm, above all, a human.

That's how I took a deep breath, sank in relief, and started over.