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[26 Jul 2008|02:33am] |
Let me tell you, I was pretty pissed off when my parents told me we were moving to America. Granted, thats where they were from, but I was born in Australia, all my friends were there, and what was so great about America anyway? What did the US have that Australia didn't? Less kangaroos? How dreadful.
So we picked up and moved, and I was only fourteen which is an awful age to make a girl move halfway across the globe, away from all her friends and start completely anew. It was downright cruel, actually. It wasn't easy, either. I had a lot of things. We had to compile two houses worth of things - from our loft in Melbourne and our farm in King Valley. I could rant and rave about that move all day. It was a bad idea (although in retrospect, maybe it was fated), and I cried and screamed during that time period more than I ever had in my life.
Let me rewind just a little bit. My parents were Jack and Evonne. My mother was wealthy and was very proper, almost to the point of having a pole up her ass. My father owned a vineyard in California. They met when my mother's family was touring the winery my father owned. Her father was very keen on the place and decided to invest, and was even more keen when my father became interested in my mother. Mother wasn't too interested at first, but apparently Dad was pretty slick and tricked her into going out with him, and she eventually came around. So Dad had this huge pile of money from Mom's family, a hot new wife, and a booming business. They decided to buy another vineyard in Australia, and I was born three years after they moved down there. They bought the loft in Melbourne when I was born, because they didn't want me growing up in the country and because they wanted me to have access to everything I needed. I was really spoiled as a child, but that was fine by me. I was more than happy to take whatever they wanted to give me.
I was put into etiquette lessons when I was four, then I started taking piano, ballet, violin, French, and tennis lessons. My mother was very strict, and wanted me to become a proper "lady", although secretly I thought she just wanted me to have the debutante ball that she never had. She stressed manners and sophistication, and thought every woman ought to have some knowledge of all the things she put me in lessons for. She also had me reading a lot, so that I would be well read and have an expansive vocabulary with which to communicate with other sophisticates. I made a lot of very close friends who floated in the same upper-class social circle as I did. After lessons we would sneak out and get alcohol and kiss lower class boys, which we thought was great fun. We were a pretty close knit circle, and I was very content with my life.
So when we moved, I was pretty devastated. Life as I knew it was changing completely.
We moved back to my father's vineyard in California. Napa Valley is gorgeous but really boring. The miles and miles of grape vine gets really boring after a while. I made a few friends who were easily replaceable. I spent most of my time reading and locking myself up in my room. I was pretty depressed, and I spent two years that way.
I was sixteen when I met James Banhart, who was thirty...okay, okay fine he was forty-two at the time. He, like my mother's family, had come to our vineyard to look into investing. I was instantly infatuated and actually ended up pouring an entire glass of wine on him because I was so distracted. It wasn't that he looked so much younger - he looked every inch his forty-two years. It was his laid-back, casual manner that attracted me. He was a real cowboy type...he cared little for rules and lived his life doing whatever he wanted. He had a very free lifestyle, which was something I knew I could never have.
He stayed with us for eight days, and by the end of those eight days I had fallen in love with him, slept with him twice, and convinced him to kidnap me and take me away from my parents. I packed my things and we left in the middle of the night to begin our cross-country trip.
Being with James was exhilarating. I didn't have to answer to anyone. For a year, we traveled all the way across the United States. He told me he was going to take me to Canada, where it was legal for us to get married. I was so in love with him, he could have taken me to Antarctica and I would have been happy. We stopped somewhere on the east coast in a town called Shadow Falls, which I had never been to, and checked into the hotel because James said he was tired of sleeping in the car or in a tent. I was fine with that, because it meant a nice hot shower and a bed that we could easily share. We looked like father and daughter, and people looked at us strangely when I tried to take his hand. A sixteen year old girl shouldn't really be holding her fathers hand, but I didn't care what they thought. I was blissfully unaware of my surroundings.
He was gone by the time I woke up the following morning.
Thankfully I'd had money tucked away that he clearly didn't find. All the cash in my wallet was taken, as well as some rather expensive jewelry. I was heartbroken. I'd trusted him, loved him, practically worshiped him and he'd ditched me and robbed me blind. I kept the room, mostly because I was hoping he'd come back. But he didn't. And I'm stuck. I'm confident that I can pretty much take care of myself, but I'm quickly running out of money. I just hope I can find a way to live by myself without resorting to something drastic.
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