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.