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If I could turn back time...
Written at 1:41 p.m. on Thursday, Jun. 12, 2003

Its amazing what a little love from your mother can do for you.

I spent my lunch hour at the grocery store on the phone with my mother. I'm all about multi-tasking. No matter what kind of mood I am in, she always has a way of making me feel better. Its the motherly love, I tell ya.

We were talking about things. I go to her for alot of my advice, because well...she's been there. I tried to talk her into coming out here to visit soon. I dont know if it worked, but I tried. I would love for her to come out here. She'd be so much fun to take out with me to "Cheers" and places like that. I just dont know if I'd let her leave.

This morning, Jessica left me a message in my guestbook wanting to know why I'd moved from Baltimore to LA in the first place.

Mostly because I cant deal with things very well and I tend to run from them instead of dealing with them, like I should. I was 18 and living a reckless life. My mother, the same mother who I now love more than life itself, told me that I had to leave her house. I was angry for a while there...for a long while. I always thought How could she send me out in the world at 18 with no where to go?

It's still hard to say that I deserved it, because no one deserves not having anywhere to go. But I was a bad kid. I would stay out every night until 3am...I drank alot and even did drugs occasionally...I had people steal cars and come to my house with them...I got in high speed chases with friends who were running away from home...I was a bad kid.

Thankfully, I had good friends that let me stay with them. I was pretty much just jumping from place to place for a while. One day I met this girl named Carrie (the only real name I've ever used in here) and she let me stay with her in return for babysitting her daughter every now and them. At the time I was working three jobs...a day care center, a fire/water damage estimator and a record store.

The thing I didnt know about Carrie was her daughter's babysitter was my cousin that I had lost touch with. Before I knew it, word about my situation had spread like wildfire throughout my family. One day I received a call from my aunt out here in California. I had only met her once before that I remembered. She was practically a stranger. She wanted to help me out and gave me the option of coming out here with them or she would help me out financially there if I stayed.

I opted to go. I wanted so desperately to go somewhere and start all over again. I was scared though, I had never been outside of Maryland before. But I knew that this was something that I had to do...or I would later regret never taking it and seeing where it led. So my aunt booked me a ticket with a departing flight two weeks later in case I decided not to stay. She wanted me to come out for a two week visit and see if I really liked it here before I made any committment. So I came out here with one suitcase, $400 and a roundtrip ticket...and never went home.

Its amazing to look back on it all now. I feel like I've come so far and that person that I was then...that scared little girl who had never been outside of her small town...seems like a memory in a fading yesterday. There's almost no trace of her here. Everynow and then when things get hard and I have to fight, I see her. But for the most part, she was left behind in Baltimore.

I still wonder if I made the right decision. I wonder if I were to ever go back, would I be running away from things here too or would I be going back and taking care of what I should have fixed in the first place.

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