I want you to listen to Vienna, by The Fray, when you read this.
Either that, or Seventy Times Seven, by Brand New.
It depends on whether or not you want an optimistic outlook on this entire conflagration.

I just want to tell you a story, which I want you to read with unbiased eyes, which you can do, because you're a stranger.  Or, maybe a friend, forgotten.  But, strangers are more friendly than friends, because relationships are strange things, and you can be nasty to a friend, but you have to be nice to a stranger.  In morally correct eyes, that is.  But, stranger, because you are a stranger, to me, you are a friend.

Once, upon a day in July, 1991, and I wish I'd known this sooner, a fifteen-year-old girl was in the right place at the right time.  For the man who forced her virginity to run away.  it didn't tip-toe, and it didn't jog.  It stumbled, tripped, fell, and then ran while getting back up, and took loud, thunderous steps, as it sprinted away, arm-in-arm with her childhood.  And, we wait a few months of secrecy, denial, depression, a mental illness, morning sickness, and abdominal swelling.  And, on February twenty-fourth, 1992, something extraordinary happened.

And, I don't mean the traditional definition of extraordinary.
I mean...it was extra ordinary.
It was nothing special.

A sixteen-year-old girl squeezed out seven pounds, six ounces of something that, in an ideal world, should have changed her outlook on life.  Instead, it just changed her life.  This baby had a penis, so, in a way, it was a boy.  And, the new mother accepted that, because she had to.

Because the girl could not think of a name for this boy, she considered all the names she had heard in her life that she could remember.  And, when she couldn't remember anything other than 'David' and 'Pius', she asked the nurse.

this was when Jamiel Adam Slater was truly born.

He talked at nine months, walked at eleven.  He ate his first quarter at thirty-eight months, and decided he preferred the red kind of grapes, because they didn't hurt as much when they were inside of him.  The potty scared him until forty-one months, because he always thought a vampire was going to come out of the drain and bite him.  He wouldn't let anyone else in the room when he had to use the bathroom, either, because he didn't like them watching.

Once upon December thirty-first, the year he turned twelve (you do the math), his mother got married to a man that never had and never could have loved her, so her son could start the New Year out with a father.  Love is all lies, anyway.  At least, that was what Jamiel thought about them.  

At least, that's what he'd heard.  

Deep inside of him, though, as the flower girl chased him around the tiny reception of entirely in-laws, he wondered if he'd ever know what it was like.  He didn't know that the flower girl was technically his second cousin, and he thought she was pretty, for a ten-year-old girl.  Kind of old for a flower girl, but their resources were limited.  

Jamiel didn't know what love was like, but he thought he might like to find out for himself, rather than relying on everyone else's rants of 'love sucks, love sucks, love sucks'.

I'd like to stop there, because I want you to know that the man and the woman lived happily ever after, made a little brother for the child that they already had in addition to Jamiel, and everyone won each other over in the end.  I'd like for you to know that, but you can't know that, Stranger.  You can only think it.  I could tell you that you know.  I should tell you that you know.  But, I'd like to stop here.

I never said that I would.