I've been warned and reminded. I am to break the cycle - finish college and avoid the two-week courtship that leads to fast marriage, fast kids, and a fast end to aspirations once thought to be attainable, like a career, freedom, and individuality. All of those words used as promises and threats when you've just turned 21.
My sister still lies to herself. She tells herself that it wasn't all a mistake. I think that she believes in fate in her own way. Two children, divorce, and remarriage. I guess she couldn't escape, wanted to follow tradition. Allowed a man to adopt her at a bar. He made her his family and took her away from us.
My dark horse sister heard of this marriage and went out to get one for herself, like it was a contest to win, not lose. A man with foreign ties, who she told to take her on travels around the world, but she couldn't get him to leave the house. Maybe it was money, or the need for a father who had abandoned her there. I don't know. She's back to living single - I think she'll stay single, now.
But that father that left her, left me, and left my mother in the same fashion. He had followed her home in a car, convinced and smooth talked her away from her parents and a good job. He gave her babies in return. It might have lasted longer than the others, but he left soon after I was born. I saw him six years ago - I can't force myself to remember him.
And my grandmother went before that - ran away and joined my grandfather before the war. Must've thought at the time that they'd make a movie about her life. She kind of looked like a movie star back then. He wrote her letters from a POW camp and she worked at home in a factory. They didn't divorce, but she died. He still complains.
I don't know, maybe I've seen too much or I just don't care, but I'm getting to that age. I'm 21, just like the rest, and I don't want to see my stomach grow, while sitting around watching stock quotes scroll across the television screen with a husband that teases but never touches. I want something deeper, more intense that shakes up my world - a combination of birth control and a lover that sleeps against my stomach and exhausts enough passion that cheating isn't an option. I just want to be in control and break tradition.