i feel i should explain....

in the note my mother left she mentioned a boy named hal. and i want to explain him more to everyone.........
hal moved to saline when i was in the 9th grade. and we hit it off. if you have ever been to saline. Mich. you would understand. you have to fit into 3 categories to fit in, in saline.
1. a farmer
2. play sports or
3. have lots and lots of money.

me, being from a single parent household and living with my grandparents we had no money. and my mother worked 2 jobs.

i wasn't exactly trying to fit in either. i love being different and living so cloe to ann arbor, i knew that being different was ok. my mom would buy me the clothes i wanted but i loved going to the thirft store and dressing vintage and using rubberbands for bracelets.

but back to hal....

when he moved to saline i was his first friend and we got along great. and with him being gay it didn't make my mother all nervous about me hanging around a guy. and hal's mother was awesome!!! she adopted me like her own and would eventually try and protect me from my own mother, but we will go back to that.

hal's dad had no idea he was gay, so i played the girlfriend role. he was my best friend and we got along great. we did everything together, we were inseparable. i even stayed the night at his house. which was okay, i slept on the couch in the gameroom. anything to get away from my own family was great. and hal's house was flippin insane. they lived in manchester, michigan in this old farm house. i swear it was haunted. one time we were upsets playing pool and we heard the dishes moving below in the kitchen and we thought awesome "mom's" home and its time to eat. but boy were we wrong. no one was home and the table was set. we looked at each other in awe. how cool!!! we really thought nothing of it and went back upstairs to finish our game.

in saline no one understood gays or blacks for that matter. we went to school in an old german town. i can only remember 5 blacks in the school the whole time i went there and the farmers were cruel. they called them the n-word and told them to return to africa. it was truly ashame to be around people who had no respect for anyone different. and there were a couple of gays some who were not out and some who were. and there was one girl who played softball who we all new was gay, but she was the only one who was accepted because she played sports. and all of my other friends who were got hell, and anyone who tried to protect them. i was thrown into lockers, called a lesbian, a nigger lover. they would stop at nothing to try and break us down. i would never give up and til this day i will protect the people i love.

hal and i used to find things to do. living in saline wasn't fun by any means. we would go into ann arbor and hang out down town but that got old quick. so we started hanging out at this teen club in detroit of all places. it was in a safer part thank god. because when i look back now, its like holy shit. i refuse to go into detroit unless i am going to see a play, concert or sports game.

but on this night it would change our whole life. we left the club and it was snowing pretty bad. we headed back to my granparents house so i could grab some clothes. it was the middle of december, almost christmas......to be continued subaway has arrived :) yippeee!!!!!

so, we stopped back at my house so i could grab clothes. it was close to midnight if not later. my dog had just had a litter of puppies and they were so darn cute. my mom told me i should stayed and i told her i would be fine and we left. i think that year it was our big snow storm. so we headed to manchester which was about an hour from saline. the best way to get there is taking back roads. as we were driving i got a text and hal had to pee so we stopped in this tiny little town that you literally miss if you blink. after we finished our business, we got back into the car. all i remember is that hal was driving too fast and then we ended up on the road with a truck that had flipped over. when i finally realized what had happened i told hal we needed to get up and get help. we were in the middle of the country and there were only too houses by us. barely being able to walk, holding my shoulders up to my next, we starting walking towards the house. my legs couldn't really carry me, and i laid in the snow in front of a farm house. i heard a dog barking and not knowing if it would attack me i got up yet again and walked toward the front of the house. barely being able to breathe let alone talk, i knocked so softly no one would ever hear me and the whisper screams for help did nothing. so i sat to wait falling in and out of consciousness waiting for help which seemed like an eternity. all of the sudden a car came out of no where and ran up to me. all the time hal had gone off to other houses trying to get help. he wasn't hurt as badly as i was and he was able to be mobile and get help. i was unable to walk. i had became his air bag in a sense. when the truck flipped over, i cushioned his "fall."

When the guy came, i assume running to me, i remember holding his hand and asking him not to leave me. he assured me though he was going to get us help. and what felt like a matter of minutes, help had arrived. to this day, i feel he was my guardian angel.

in the ambulance ride i held onto hal and i remember the paramedic asking me time after time was i still with him. to respond and answer him.

when we got to the hospital, i don't remember too much because i kept my eyes closed the whole time. i know my grandpa came and he had to leave me to go back to get my mother. he didn't know how badly i was hurt. she then came and never left my side. because the hospital they ended up taking me to was the hospital my mother was a r.n. at. and i was just a floor below her.

finally after all my test they came back to tell my mother i had broken my back. a millimeter away from being paralyzed. i have my thorasic t3-t9 fused. i had broken my right shoulder and some of my ribs. doctors came in amazed...they said as soon as i got up to walk and let alone getting up to walk twice my spine should have snapped in half.

after all the surgeries and finally being able to go back home, it has been a long recovery. til this day i live with pain and the reminder of what happened to me. so for my mother to bring up hal, and say it was my fault, i say how dare you. i was 15, you should have been a parent and told me NO. i don't blame her. i did my own thing. i didn't listen.

such is life i guess.....