Completed - 112,342 words.
Sample.
My birth was an unforeseen happenstance for my seventeen year old Mother who never really wanted the burden of parenthood in the first place. This became all the more evident when I was three years old and she abandoned me in favour of a career after divorcing my Father.
In 1970 she remarried and I was despatched to Canada after she won custody of me in a court battle. The encumbrance of a seven year old was never taken into consideration but when I developed an allergy to the sun and had to stay indoors during the peak period, the stress levels of the house rose higher.
We moved to America and it was shortly after enrolling in a new school that the class bully moved in for the kill by coercing his older brother into beating me up because of his dislike for what he thought to be my diseased back and neck. Meanwhile a girl in my home room had befuddled me by getting extremely close and then in turn objecting to my proximity to her? When I asked my Mother for advice on this confusing matter, it was dismissed casually and the repercussion of said incident had a profound effect upon me.
A couple of years later I was rejected by the first girl I had fallen in love with and then when we moved back to Canada, I was given two more blows to my self esteem. I attempted to approach my parents about my adolescent angst but my Mother's unsympathetic attitude just made me feel all the more miserable.
In 1977, at the age of fourteen, I started to attend a social venue and met another girl whom it appeared from the outset would become romantically involved with me. At a class party at the end of term, I asked her for a dance and got rejected again, only this time it became an act of humiliation in front of all my classmates and I spent my junior graduation night at home crying, instead of attending the most anticipated and significant event of the school term.
After watching 'Star Wars' and 'Close Encounters of the Third Kind' in the cinema I became inspired to think about the prospects of a career in the film industry, but worried that my ambitions would be thwarted because of the disruption at home when my Mother left to live with another man. In the meanwhile, my resolve was put to the test when I was rejected a further five times in a three month period.
At the beginning of 1979, a new girl joined my close-knit circle of friends and as the year progressed I fell in love for the second time in my life. I considered the two of us to be 'a couple' of which she had verified during our time spent together. We never made our relationship physical (including kissing), but I was unsure if it was purely fear on my part due to the amount of disappointments I had in the past, or if the hesitation to go the next level was due to her.
After an extended visit to England during Christmas time, I returned to Canada in the New Year and upon reacquainting myself with my friends, an eerie feeling overcame me when I was treated with contempt by my girlfriend and her best mate. Unsure of why this was happening, I continued to spend time with them until one day they conspired to plot my downfall . . . My girlfriend decided to go to bed with my arch-enemy and her act of betrayal was brought to my attention when he produced evidence of the fact. The incident had been specifically planned to hurt me on a day normally associated with the celebration of life, my seventeenth birthday . . .
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