Stupidity and anger. That’s what this is. All of it. My life. What good is coming from it? No good. I am forced to miss school, in which I am burying myself on a daily basis in my all-honors classes, for five days in a row and the precious Spring Break before those days to go visit relatives that I barely know for two whole weeks. Two weeks with no contact to any of my friends, or my pet bird. I don’t even get to take my books with me, or my laptop, or even my guitar. Why does it feel like they are taking me to a prison, stripping me of all my relationships, my favorite possessions, anything that matters? How can I keep living my life without the things that keep me alive? My life is here and, though I want to visit other places, Ukraine just is not one of them. It may be my homeland, but it’s foreign to me all the same. They tell me that every day counts, that my grandparents want to see us, that they haven’t seen us in six years. I have barely ever seen them anyways. These are people that I don’t know, that I have not been given the chance to ever get to know, to forge a bond with. They took them away from me in the first place, took away the chance for a normal relationship with my grandparents. Now they are saying to me, “You’re grandparents want to see you, you ungrateful child. They have that right. You are so selfish and self-centered. You just care about what is convenient for you.” I’m self-centered? I’m taking away their rights to see me? NO! My own parents took away those rights. Now they are blaming me for everything. My life will be a disaster, a train wreck, a collapsed mine when I get back. And I will not be myself. I fear I will have lost all contact with my friends, and when I reappear after two weeks of not seeing them, not talking to them, not even emailing them, they will look at me and think, ‘Who is that? I think I probably know her, but still who is that?’ Not all of them will think that to themselves, but I have very few friends anyways. It feels like I am trying to spread my wings but I’m caught in a small cage, and the bars are electrically charged anyway, so every time I try to touch them I will get electrocuted and burned. The only reason I am still alive is because I have a little tiny sliver of hope still left that I will break free of the cage someday and fly away. Yet I fear that when the cage doors open I will not break free; I will not know how to fly (I never got the chance to learn), and I will stay trapped for the rest of my life, even with the door to the cage open before me.