Evidently I'm partial to tragedy.

I suppose, poetics aside, that the reason for this is my past. A proper chronology, though vague, may offer insight into why I have such an affinity. My first memory is waking up at the age of four, remembering nothing of my life before that day, not even my name, or that house I was in. At age four, my parents got into an argument about me, which led to their divorce... Which I should explain. My father took me to the bar he frequented when he was young and left me with a stack of quarters in a dirty arcade in an inlet there, whereas my mother often took me to visit friends of hers that had a pension for violence(though he seemed tame enough at the time), the lifeblood of Italians I suppose. That Italian's name was John, he had salt and pepper colored, curly hair, and deep frown lines between his eyebrows... but he was wealthy. She wanted to divorce the drunk, and he wanted to divorce the person exposing his son to the wrong crowd.

After that, the custody battle ensued and my mother moved in with John. My mother won at first, for a year or so. She got weekdays and my father got weekends. Life under that roof was brutal. John was creative in how he delivered 'punishment'. I can list some of the transgressions I remember, leaving a crack in the door behind which he pinned my brother, sticking his hand out of his own daughter's room to ensnare the first person to walk by, namely me, and throw me into the room and pin me down... There were a great many beatdowns in the basement and my mother often got into heated arguments with him over these matters. I can't recall if she was ever struck herself, but it didn't matter. My father appealed to the court claiming she was an unfit mother... and they agreed. At this point I was still a defiant kindergartner. I found drawing pictures to be below me.

Then first grade rolled around, suffice to say I was an awful student in elementary school. My father sheltered me and apparently loved me but most often left me to my own devices with Super Monkey Ball. I was rarely able to actually leave the house which he needed his mother's assistance to tend. Sometime when I was seven, my father started getting increasingly intense migraines that were eventually debilitating. It was Leukemia. He was administered Chemo frequently, and we did well to attend in the dull and odd smelling hospital lounge. My father called it special cancer and that it's rare. At any rate, he went into remission sometime after only one hair was left on his head. That's when he decided to go on vacation to one of his friends that happened to be scummy denizens of a trailer park. I knew it was a bad idea, for him, at least. He got pneumonia and went into a three month long coma. His hospital room was our living room. Eating breakfast there, one could hear the heart rate monitor. When my mother and I visited him for the last time, I said "He's not gonna make it" My mother fervently disagreed, but lo and behold he was dead in the same week. He stopped breathing. I remember us getting a flag in the mail from his military days, but I most remember not caring about the funeral, or his death. I spent the funeral eating the sandwiches they were serving in favor of mourning and listening to the other visitor's obligated "I'm sorry for your loss"es. Most of the people there only arbitrarily knew him.

It was pretty silent after that. Everything in my father's old home was sold and my grandmother moved back to Ohio. My mother decided it was time to change venues after much insisting on our part. We moved into a small, one floor home with less than 1,000 square feet of space. She met another John after meeting various others... broke up with him, then ended up going back to him. She worked late, She left at 6ish, at which time I had to wake up for school, and got home at nine on a good day. Sometimes she'd arrive home after I'd already gone to sleep. It was a sad state of affairs, but it was peaceful. Not at school, though. I was bullied and got jumped regularly. The friends I did make were sparse and even some of them weren't very good "Raymond germs" cursed me all through middle school. Eventually we moved halfway through my 6th grade year, sometime after new John and my mother got married. That middle school was far better and more accepting. High school was a time of growth for me, which was also fairly quiet save from people's lack of sympathy toward 'lesser animals'. Now I'm in college, and I just wrote art. It just happens to be about a tragedy.