tori

hi, my name is courtney. i'm here to tell you about someone very important but first, myself. i am thirteen years old and live in a city in new hampshire. i am a girl who has seen the world at its best and its worst. i have grown up too fast. when you are my age, you're still worrying about if he likes you or if you have enough make-up on. for me, i worry about war, violence, and peace in the world. i know that i am not the typical teenage girl in the world so if you want to someone like that, you should stop now and go search myspace for someone who doesn't get it.

i have always been lucky when it comes to friends and family. i have grown up into an average family and have never questioned if i was loved or wanted. i have always been capable of making friends easily and do not like being alone. it really is just one of those things that we all have. some weird feeling or notion that we just would wish could go away from us. back to me. i have grown up in the suburbs of boston and haven't been brought up in a bad part of town. i can't complain about my childhood what so ever. i can't complain about the life i lead either. but that is not why i am punching the keys tonight. for i am someone who would just want to share truth and honesty. my life was normal. then things happened.

i met a girl named tori around the age of eleven. she seemed like someone that was inspiring. she was so cool because she knew all these bands and wore cool clothes and had cool hair. and the world was blank and dark to me. i didn't worry about who was the president or why kids didn't go to school like i did. i wanted to have a way out of the original, normal enviroment i was brought up in. i have always been open to learning and listening to things that seemed strange and pecurliar to me. this girl was no exception.

tori, at first, tought me everything there was to know about this new scene i was being brought into. sure, i wasn't some cool kid and i really never have been. i looked like a little prissy kid coming into a world of anger and confusion. i remember hearing music that seemed angry but so genious with the words they sang. i didn't fully understand or care why they seemed the way they did and jumped right into this new world of the internet. these kids amazed me. they taught me to listen to some pretty great music and became this person that didn't care about the world still. this scene i had fallen into was my new home and seemed to hold people that i understood and that understood me.

tori was very vulnerable. she told me stories of her past. she told me how her parents were divorced and that her father was abusive. first, i grew up with kids that all had two parents- a mom and a dad. sure there were a few kids that had divorced parents but the magority did not. i remember hearing the stories she'd tell of how her father abused her mother and how she had to watch. i didn't know anything like this before she told me. i didn't understand why people hurt other people. i didn't understand much to be honest at that age. so as the monthes went on i took a ride through tori's head. i knew her like the back of my hand but her world was confusing and hurtful.

she taught me things for the first time. she taught me how to take hurtful words and be a sheild against them. she taught me curse words and what alcohal did to you. if you could name something horrible that could happen to a person, it has happened to tori. first, she told me how she used to be suicidal. she had cut her wrists and at the time i thought "why on earth is this girl hurting herself?" then it lead onto her anorexia. tori always worried about her weight and would tell me how it dropped seveirly. it seemed almost unreal when she told me she weighed 60 pounds and still was not satisfied with herself. the only thing to remember when i tell this story is that i didn't know squat. i was learning how to write paragraphs and how to divide fractions while all of this was thrown at my face.

i felt as though tori was my problem. it occured often that i'd stay up late on AIM with the lights out in my room while i punched the keys talking to tori. she would tell me how she have given up. how the world was too hard and she couldn't take it anymore. i felt like whatever tori felt, i felt too. so i told her how if she wasn't going to live, how much it would hurt more than her. i reminded her how much her sisters, mother, and friends loved her even when it never seemed so. i can strongly say that i saved tori's life on a few occations.

tori's problems never went away. she continued to cut at times and went to a rehabilitation center to help treat her anorexia. i remember talking to her and her telling how she was  better now. that her weight was normal and that life was becoming easier for her. well, one of tori's biggest deamons was alcohal and ciggerettes. tori started drinking at the ripe age of seventeen or somewhere around there. she would always tell me that she had a hangover or that she got completely wasted the night before. when she was sober she told me how she regreted it but would always reach for the bottle yet again. she also smoked which was not good for her at all. i knew deep down in my guts that tori would never be stable. she'd never be ok. she was my problem still and at the age of eleven i thought i had to fix her.

i learned about life in the course of one summer. i learned about consiquences and the deamons of the world. tori would tell me repeatedly "don't make the mistakes that i have made." i have never forgotten these words and play them in my head all the time. i have decided to live my life the opposite of tori. if i didn't know tori i wouldn't know what not to do. tori was a blessing for me. i hope that i helped her as much as my little self can and i have grown from her, too. she was my best teacher. one day, she's going to read the words that i written for her. this same day, i hope she will be alright.

i do not know if tori is alive at this moment. i have decided that one day, i'm going to hop in a car and drive myself down to texas. i will bring her a copy of my book and i will finally meet the person that has influenced me the most. she will look through my book and see at the begining "to tori- because we learn from our mistakes" and she will understand what she means. tori changed my life. even though she is the fallen angel and the typical wreak of the world, she is more. she is more than a bottle and i wish and pray that she will understand this for at least one second out of one day.

i'm not hear to tell about my life. i'm here to write the words that i knew i had in me. i wrote this book for many reasons. one is for tori. i think we all have a tori out there in this big bad world. we search for this tori. we ourselves might be someones tori.