After

The thing is, I'm in pain. I'm in more pain than I was when my favorite teacher died of lung cancer. That makes me sound like a horrible person, but it's how I feel.
How do I feel? I feel hurt, and skeptical, and embarrassed, humiliated. The thing is, lung cancer is unpredictable, unpreventable, it had one path to take, and that was forward.

But this? This had many paths that could've played out. Many, many forking roads, each one I could've stopped at, taken the other instead. And the irony, the IRONY, is that I took the ones that led to this mess, which, in a way, you could label as self-destruction.

When I read that valedictorian speech a year ago, I foresaw forking roads. And I urged my fellow classmates to make those decisions on their own, because realizing that others had made you walk down a path over another--even if it was willingly--is cheap. Is irresponsible. Is something to regret the rest of your life.

Now I've made those decisions, and I ended up here. I could blame it on others, say they led me here. But strip all that finger-pointing away, you have me choosing to believe favorable arguments over realistic instincts. When it comes down to it, I led myself here.

And it's everything and nothing I could do to get out.