Springtime was a great time in Millington. It simply meant that summer was just around the corner. There wasn't much to do in this small town and I hated the idea of doing nothing the entire summer. I wanted to move back into the city. I never wanted to move into the country and be miles and miles from that city skyline I loved so much. In all the years I lived in the city, it never crossed my mind to even step foot in this town outside of a town outside of Memphis. There was no purpose for it. I loved the city, I loved everything about it.

                Springtime also meant there were decisions that needed to be made. I had been accepted to the University of Nashville. Against my mother's wishes, I signed the paperwork and sent it back to the University, it was the choice I wanted and I wasn't going to let her or anyone stop me. Being in Nashville meant I would be in the middle of a music scene that would help gravitate me to where I wanted to end up.

                I was the outcast in the small town of Millington. I didn't know how different I was until I was put in a room full of people how I had no interests with. Every female in my age range was planning their weddings and their future families. None of them cared to make plans for what they wanted to do with their lives for themselves. Being married and children wasn't something I had even thought about.

                A family of my own wasn't something that was a priority for me. In all honesty I didn't want to end up like my mother. She relied on a man for everything. She made the world she lived in revolve around the wants and needs of a man. I wasn't going to be that person. I vowed to myself that I would never let a guy that far into my heart to know what it felt like to have to let them go.

                My parents were married right out of high school. Both had dreams of attending college together and making their dreams reality. In their sophomore year of college my mother found out she was pregnant with my brother. She tried to continue with school and dealing with being a new mom, and a new wife. She finished one semester of her junior year, then she found out she was pregnant again, with me this time. I seemed to be the final nail in the coffin for her. She was handling everything that life had handed her, but the reality of two children, a job, a husband, and school was set in and she dropped out. I became the blame for her life not working out the way she wanted.

                It wasn't however my father to blame for the reason she never saw the signs that he wasn't faithful, that was her fault. I saw the signs and I was only a child. She didn't want to see the signs. She didn't want to believe that she had given up her dreams for a man that would leave her just years after their fairytale wedding day. When my parents divorced, my mother moved us to the city. Living in a small town in the south, divorce wasn't something you did. She couldn't handle the scrutiny, she opted to run from it.

In the years that followed Christopher became my saving grace. He wasn't much older than I was, but he was all I had. She became a person I didn't know anymore. She bounced us from apartment to apartment with her boyfriend of the month. We never knew what each day brought us. She finally came around and found herself a wealthy banker that took her under his wings. I thank god for him every day. James was the best thing that ever happened to our lives. But he was also the one person that took me from the one that I had constant in my life, the one thing I had ever known. The city.

My father, I don't think I would know who he was if I past him on the street. I haven't seen him once in the last eight years. I heard a few years ago that he had gotten remarried and had more children, but that was uncertain as well. I could have crossed paths with them many times and never known.

                When I walked in the door today, I saw the envelope my mother had in her hand. It was a large white envelope with the university's logo printed on the top left corner. I knew I was going to be lectured about this but I didn't expect the out pour that I received.

"When were you going to inform me that you were going to attend a University that was across the state? Did you think at all how this would make me feel or how James would feel about you moving hundreds of miles away?" She slams the packet down on the table. "James pulled a lot of strings to ensure that job at the bank for you."

 "I want to do this. I don't want to work at the bank forever. It's a great summer job but..." I picked up the envelope off the table, "this is what I want to do with my life. Why is it so difficult to accept that?" My face was heated; the blood through my entire body was at boil point. My mother had no right to tell me what she thought I should do. I remember being eight years old and taking care of myself. I seemed to have made the best choices I could for myself then, why now a decade later does she seem to think she knows better. I understood she should have an opinion about the choices I was making, she was my mother after all but this had to be my choice. This was something I was decided to do for the next forty or so years.

"It's irresponsible Ashlee. Just irresponsible." She rolled her eyes.

I snapped back quickly, "The irresponsible choice would have been deciding not to go to college in the fall. The irresponsible choice would be settling for the first thing I was offered."

She rolled her eyes at me again, tapping her newly purchased heels off of the table. "The career path you're choosing is not realistic. It's not something you are going to be able to support a family on. It's a choice your making now you think is the right one, but it's not."

I stood up, "I won't have a family to support. You have made that very clear time and time again that I can't love anyone enough to have a husband. My decision is just that, my decision." I turned and walked out of the room but she wasn't done with the conversation.

She starts screaming at me, even louder this time. "Ashlee Rose, I did not give up my entire life for you to screw everything by making stupid choices... I gave up so much for you to have what you have."

"I never asked you one time to give up anything." I closed my eyes exhaling a deep breath. My hands started flying around, my pointer finger ended up being pointed directly at her, "That was a choice you made." I walked out the front door, slamming it behind me.

                I was the person I was because of her. And I don't know if that was in spite of her or because of her. I learned through the choices she made at a very young age, what to do and what not to do. I wasn't going to make the same choices she did. I wasn't going to end up the way she did. As much as I loved James and respected him, by mother didn't know what love was. She saw a security in him and she took it with open arms. Love wasn't something I had really known in my life.

                I went to the one place I knew always may be see clarity. I started up the path I had run up so many times before. I had a one track mind running up that path.  I was headed for one spot in particular. It was the highest point that overlooked the water of the lake moving below it. I felt on top of the water at all times. Something about the quietness of being this far out from the world and the water flowing freely around me, made the choices in life a little easier to deal with.

                I heard the strums of a guitar riff, passing it off as music in my head. But when I plopped my body down onto that rock, I felt a body behind me. I panicked for a moment. No one was ever here, I have never seen anyone here in all the years I have been coming up here. I heard the sound of a wood guitar hit the ground. I jumped, turning to see a guy sitting there, shocked as well.

"Who are you?" I asked watching him pick up the guitar. "Why are you here?"

"Why don't you watch were your going?" he snapped, "You just knocked my most prized possession on the ground."

I watched him, the way he moved, and the way he spoke. He was strikingly gorgeous. His cheekbones were perfectly chiseled. His lips were perched perfectly as the words flowed out. His eyes, oh his eyes were the perfection of blue. When our eyes locked the oddest feeling overcame my thought process. Within hours of meeting him, I learned quickly that we were one and the same.

Day after day I would show up to the lake hoping I would see him, that feeling was weird. I have never wanted someone in my life the way I wanted him. I hid that from him and even myself. I was stubborn and had that wall up preventing him from getting to know who I really was, but he managed to break that wall down. He not only broke through it, he shattered it. I fought it. I didn't want to be that woman. I didn't want to need a man. I didn't want to be my mother. It wasn't like that with us.

The first time I jumped off that cliff, with his hand in mine I knew I was letting the wall down. "You ready?" he asked with an enormous smile on his face.

"As I'll ever be..." I exhaled, scared. The jump was far.

"On 3." He said.

"On 3 or after 3?" I questioned. My nerves were getting the best of me.

"Whatever!"

"No... no... no... it's not whatever..."

"Fine, Ms. I need to have every detail.... We will count backwards. After 1, we jump. Got it?"

"Yea, got it." Against my better judgment, I did as he said.

"3...2...1...."

"Ahhhh!" I screamed as hit the water. We landed, still latched together. He leaned in pressing his soft lips on mine. He was scared at first, he thought I didn't want it. But as he pulled away I pulled him back in, wrapping my arms around his waist, deepening the kiss.

It was the first of many unforgettable kisses. The first of many unforgettable moments.

He was this talent waiting to burst through the threshold of the industry. Many nights I sat and listened to him hum a melody. I didn't need to hear any lyrics he had written, the tone in his voice as it hummed was all I needed. With his talent, I had found my very first artist. Once I was finished with school, He would give me my name.

My mother thought and believed that my relationship with Justin was the wrong choice in the beginning. As the time passed she thought that if she was on board with the relationship it would prevent me from going away to school. But unlike my mother, I didn't have to choose one over the other.

When summer came to a close and September was just around the corner, I went to Nashville. We both dreaded that time coming and it took work on both parts, but we made it work. We traveled to see each other non-stop. Each summer, I would return to Millington and return to that lake, spending each day with him watching the sunset, falling asleep in his arms under the stars, and watching the sun rise. The miles apart never stopped the love in our hearts, it made us stronger.

                Looking back at that first summer with him, it changed everything I ever thought about love. The fear of love subsided at the waist side when I was wrapped in his arms. I fell madly in love with him. With everything I had in me, I tried not to but he pulled me into the dark side known as love. There was nothing to be scared of anymore. Well, nothing other than the end.