#febmetalpunk #fmp2022 Day 23: Friend - This is Melody, my best friend from High School. I grew up with an evil abusive step-mother who spent all her time while my Dad was at work, devising ways to make my life a misery. She'd send me to school in dirty clothes and hide my hairbrushes and keep me out of any activities so the kids all picked on me and I was universally hated by everyone from the time I was in second grade till somewhere about the last year or two of High School when she couldn't control me anymore and I started listening to Heavy Metal. Melody was from California and didn't know anything about how you weren't supposed to think I was cool, and she liked Metal too, so she made friends with me. She had a step-father who made her work for everything, so she had an after-school job at a laundromat and she'd take me to work with her and I'd wash my clothes for free there. She bought herself a shitty car and we rode off into the sunset listening to Motley Crue and Metallica and did cool stuff with cool people who were like us. We were good kids and we were smart so we didn't skip classes but we went to see bands play and we had adventures and became people outside of High School where kids still teased me in the hall, just because they always had, and that was their whole life. I went to college in Indiana because her family moved there. My dad didn't want me to go because he thought the midwest was somehow beneath me. He had a serious disconnect between who i actually was and how I was actually living if he couldn't see that this was going to be a great move for me and pretty much the only move for me. I had almost no life skills from not being allowed to do anything besides watch TV in a room by myself since I was 8, and I had to start from scratch and learn everything about how to be a person when I left home. Having Melody and her family around for those first few years I was on my own was critical for me. She got married and moved to Colorado and I went to England for awhile and we lived very different lives. She's on the East Coast now last I checked. We still keep in touch. I grew up to be a person and I'm ok. So did she so it all worked out. https://www.instagram.com/p/CaUhzTMrA78/?utm_medium=tumblr
