This was written for class, and was supposed to mirror a main point from one of the parables of the horrible book, The Joy Luck Club.

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It was yesterday, when Alan was told that his parents were going to get a divorce. He didn’t understand what that meant at first, but his mom simply said to him, “You’ll never see your dad again.” Alan became confused, and wondered what he had done to make his dad not want to see him. Because he was so young, at the age of 8, he had no way to express his sadness to anyone except to cry himself to sleep.

Less than a week after his mother told him about the divorce, Alan and his mom moved across the country. As if his parent’s separation wasn’t hard enough, he had to cope with completely new surroundings. All that Alan wanted was to be alone, and to accept that his life would never be the same again. He thought constantly about how everything had changed: where his new home was, the friends he would never see again, and so much more. Soon enough, he began to blame all his sadness and anger on his father.

Alan was viewed by the other children at school as an outsider. He never talked to anyone, participated in class, or even did anything but drown in his misery during recess. His mind often wandered during class, thinking time and time again about the drastic changes in his life. He didn’t feel comfortable being anywhere, except in his own dream world, where his life was perfect again, before all the changes.

The image of his father, had warped into something evil. His father had become the devil he cursed everyday before bed. As the days turned into months, and the months into years, he came to the conclusion that he never really knew his father. This man who came home everyday late at night, and never spent any time with Alan, except a few hours, if that much, on the weekends. Alan often asked himself “Who was this man?” Alan didn’t even remember what his father liked to do in his spare time, or even if he liked to eat any of the foods Alan liked to eat. It was his mother who was the victim, and the man he didn’t even know was the person responsible for murdering who Alan would have been some day. He could have been a successful businessman, but instead he was a drunkard, at the age of 16. He often drank until he was sick. The funny thing about it was that there wasn’t any peer pressure involved. Alan never had any friends, and was consumed by his hatred and sadness, even after all the years that had passed.

Alan had distorted all the details of what the first 8 years of his life had actually been like. All the memories of playing catch with his father were gone. They were replaced with illusions of his father beating Alan with the baseball bat that was used for batting the balls. He also replaced all the memories of his father teaching Alan how to swim with his father trying to drown him in the bathtub. His father became the worst man ever to live in this world.

Alan never talked about any of these horrible thoughts with his mother. Alan’s twisted attitude towards life went mostly disregarded by his mother, because she thought he was just “going through a phase.” Not until Alan’s mother actually caught him with an empty bottle of vodka, did she have an epiphany that her son truly had serious problems. It was after this event that Alan’s mother confessed to him that it wasn’t true that his father did not want to see him all those years, but rather that she had not allowed his father to see Alan. It didn’t matter at that point though; the mental damage had already been done.