A funeral was supposed to be a series of final moments- final hellos, final farewells, the final time you'd see the dearly departed with your own two eyes before the casket was closed and lowered into the ground forever. . . it was the final moment for everything there was about that person.

But not for me. The funerals for Andrew and Camila Wilson, my parents, were a series of beginnings for me.

I remember it all just like it was yesterday. The little church an hour away from our home was packed to the brim that early Sunday morning for the service. I knew that my parents were pretty well-known and popular, but nothing could have prepared me for the number of unfamiliar faces that showed up to pay their respects to the both of them in a church that was designed to only hold about fifty people minimum, not nearly two hundred.

I was seated in the front row- two feet away from my parent's dead corpses that were lain in beautiful open caskets, one wonderfully peach pink with golden specks littered across the sides, and one a sleek obsidian black that was shiny enough to see your own reflection in. They were my parent's favorite colors, colors you would commonly see them wearing during their time alive.

I thought it was stupid.

It didn't matter what color casket you put a corpse in, a corpse was still a corpse, and I was sure they wouldn't have cared what fancy casket they were put into. I'm pretty sure the both of them would have been equally as satisfied if you were to just throw them in a hole, shovel dirt on top of them, and stick a holy cross in the middle that had the words "IM DEAD" craved on it.

But my grandparents on my mom's side insisted on giving their daughter and her husband an exorbitant sendoff mostly for their benefits of wanting to show off to the community, not necessarily for theirs.

I guess my series of beginnings started when I first walked up to their caskets and saw their bodies. It looked like the two of them were placed in some kind of magic, deep sleep. . . as if they could have both been awoken with a kiss from a prince.

When my dad's eyes were closed, you could really see how long his eyelashes were when they weren't partially hidden by the thick-rimmed glasses he often wore because he was as blind as a bat. His hair was neatly combed back which allowed you to see the specks of gray hair that would have consumed his entire head was he able to live just a little longer. He had his best suit on, the one he bought while he was on a business trip to Milan that he was able to swindle for half the original price. He would always tell that dumb story whenever he had the chance to, especially in front of new people. I'd never thought I'd miss hearing it.

Looking at him up close like that, I noticed once again in my life, that we really didn't look all that similar. The only thing I inherited from him was his height, and maybe his shitty eyesight, but that's it. I don't know why right then it bothered me as much as it did. I guess I thought that if he was going to die, I at least could have reminded people that I was in fact his son, but I couldn't even do that.

Though my dad looked as charming as ever, my mom, however- wow, the words I say will never be able to accurately describe how resplendent she looked while facing eternal slumber.

Her normally mid-length hair she always had in some kind of ponytail or bun hung loosely and curled around her body like a snake. The vibrant seafoam green dress I had seen her wore only once- when she and my dad went on a couples vacation to the Bahamas one summer, the best trip she claims she had ever been on despite always traveling the world, blended in perfectly with her tawny skin. Her mouth seemed to rest into a natural smile as if she were about to burst into a laugh while only pretending to be asleep.

She never woke up.

I say that this was one of my beginnings because it was at that moment when the reality hit me of their deaths- that they were never coming back. That they were gone forever, and I'd never see them again. And it was a very long time before I was able to even accept that.

My second beginning, was after we had the service and lowered them both down into the earth and had the repast at my house after, it dawned on me that I was now an orphan. Usually, when kids lose a parent, they still had one leftover to stay with while they took care of them. Because I had the shittiest luck in the world, both were taken away from me and I was left with no one.

I saw then how much my relatives didn't really give a shit about me. No one wanted to be the guardian of a kid who was freshly broken and damaged. Most of them already had children of their own, so they didn't have the energy to take on another mouth to feed. Some others were either married, dating, or single, and the thought of having a kid to be a parent disgusted them. And finally, the rest were just way too young in their minds to take care of me and felt like if they did, they'd be wasting the freedoms of their twenties.

I really believed that I was going to be thrown into some foster care home for the remainder of my teenage years, alone and wishing that someone would have just stepped up to look after me just for a little while until I graduated and went off to college so I could have been out of their hair forever. But no one was willing to make that kind of sacrifice for some kid they only saw during family events or the holidays.

My grandparents on both sides did offer to take me, which I appreciated, but the problem with that is that the ones on my dad's side lived all the way in West Virginia, and the ones on my mom's side lived a little closer, New York, but that was still too far for me. It wasn't like I was attached to this place, I wasn't even born here, it was just because of the small simple fact that I didn't want to be too far apart from my best friend.

I wouldn't have had been able to bear it.

But suddenly days before I was due to move in with my grandparents, my Uncle Rodger decided to step up and ask them if it would be alright for them to allow him to become my official guardian.

Though I wasn't opposed to the idea, I didn't really know how to act around him without the presence of my parents. Even if all three of them were all old college buddies and super close to one another, Uncle Rodger and I were not. I never thought that we had a reason to be. Before we left Texas, I only ever saw my uncle during the holidays, and sometimes, during my birthday if he felt like making that twenty-four-hour trip. So for him to basically become my new parent, felt a little weird.

Uncle Rodger didn't have any kids of his own even though he was married once before, years ago, to a pretty woman named Sarah. Though they were together, it didn't really feel like they were a couple. To me, it felt like they only interacted with each other when other people were around to keep up the facade that they loved each other. There were some nights when I was younger and my parents wanted to go out on dates alone so they would leave me with them, and the house was always so quiet that you could probably hear a pin drop. My uncle and I would say hello to each other if we just so happened to run into each other while we were in his house, which wasn't often since he was always either in his office or his room working, and I would never see Sarah until the early hours of the morning when she was coming back home after spending a night out on the town with her friends. It didn't surprise me that their marriage ended in divorce, what surprised me was that it took them five years to do it.

I wish I could tell you how our relationship went from being awkward and us barely saying a word to each other to us frequently going back and forth with spats and arguments and the entire house turning into a shit show, but I can't remember what made things turn left so quickly as they did. Maybe it had something to do with me and how incredibly infuriating I was, or maybe it was because he realized that looking after his older brother's damaged kid wasn't something he could handle after all. I don't know and I don't know if I ever will.

The last series of beginnings that I went through was when I met Sky, Dylan, and Courtney, while also rekindling my middle school friendship with Christopher Bishop, who everyone usually just called Chris.

Those four were commonly known as my high school's number one popular trouble makers, especially Sky.

Sky reached out to me first after the entire school had found out about my parent's demise, though that was a given since practically everyone in town knew who they were. Sky extending his hand of friendship was something I really needed and hanging out with him and the other guys were finally able to bring me some amount of serotonin that I so desperately needed.

For some reason, I found myself being drawn into their rebellious, carefree ways. They were just a couple of dumbasses having fun, and I wanted nothing more at the time than to be another dumbass and a part of that careless fun.

But the thing about beginnings is that at some point in time rather that be two weeks, five months, or ten years from now, an ending will eventually make its way into your life. Nothing lasts forever.

I understood that one late evening night, two days after Chris and I had gotten arrested, when I opened the door to my front door to find Lucas Bryant standing on my front porch in his stupid anime pajamas and a bird's nest of bed hair.

I blinked at him in genuine surprise, ". . . Lucas?"

The bags under his eyes only added to the exhausted sight he was showing me right now. His eyes narrowed slightly in a peeved glare.

"Yes, my name is Lucas. Thank you for pointing that out," Lucas took a big step towards me as his lips almost formed into a frown, "Now, you gonna tell me why the hell you've been ignoring me for two days in a row, or am I gonna have to beat it out of you?"