Digital Voices

One Lonely Page
Aleisha

Aleisha’s speech

Everyone comes from somewhere, and it is important to know your heritage. The past is significant to the present and the future. People are like the pages of a book. The pages before them are their ancestors, and the ones after them are their descendants. If you rip out a piece from the middle of the book, it makes little sense. You have to know what came before to completely understand. I, myself used to be a lonely page, until I found my book.
My grandmother had always told me that I had the same personality as my great-great grandmother, Beverly. To be honest, I never really cared. However, I recently found my grandmother’s family tree. It dated all the way back to the Mayflower. Down near the bottom I saw written in a flowery scrawl Beverly (O’Neil) Andrews 1862-1957. Underneath the dusty life map was a pile of yellowing papers. A little journal on top caught my eye. It was my great-great-grandmother’s journal. Only the first four pages were written in. It told a story of how she had fallen in love. Sadly, the man wasn’t in love with her.
Like Beverly, I have suffered from a one-sided love for almost a year. My heart had shattered when I realized that it would probably always be one-sided. I had seen movies in which the main character overcame their feelings and moved on. I had seen movies where their love was realized and accepted. It didn’t help. My mother had told me that everything would work out. She had told me I was wonderful and only a fool would give me up. That didn’t help either. I felt alone in my pain, like no one else understood my heartache.
I can’t remember how many times I read those pages. Five, six, seventy-two. On the last page, was Beverly’s greatest gift to me. A passage about how she had learned to move on. Knowing that someone who is a part of me suffered as I did helped me to cope. She was the only one to truly understand.
Thanks to my dead relative’s four pages of love lessons, I managed to piece together my broken heart. I realized that even though I love that one person with all of my being, I will still be able to move on if and when the time comes.