My Boo Raldley

         When I was two years old, my brother Jack was born, and from that time forward, until the year I turned ten, I shared a room with my sister Caroline. My sister is three and a half years older than me, and when I was young I was very attached to her, in fact, I practically worshiped her. It might have been that I spent so much time with Caroline, or that my parents spent so much time with Jack, but in that period, I developed a strange fear of being left alone.
       When I finally started kindergarten, I surrounded myself with many friends so that even if one them was gone, I would still have others to play with, and talk to. I have always been a social person, and I was afraid of being solitary. Another thing I was scared of was the dark, and I never quite knew why, because it wasn't that I thought monsters would come out, but now that I look back, I know it was because the dark is so silent, it gives you time to think without distraction, lets your mind wander, and you are alone when you're in the dark- all that's there is you. When my sister was in that room with me each night, I had someone to talk to, someone to be a distraction from the ominous silence that lurked all around me.
       As I grew older, so did my sister, and she increasingly wanted to have sleep-overs with friends at their houses or somewhere else in our house. When this happened, I would have my brother Jack sleep in her bed, but not before a deafening fit on my part, which in turn lead to most of Caroline's friends generally disliking me. Above all else, I was absolutely terrified of being home alone, especially at night, and I still am a little. If ever there was a time that my parents would have to go out and my siblings had to be elsewhere, I would arrange for myself to be somewhere else too.
       As I grew older still, and I would get angry for whatever reason, I found that the best way to cool off was to be alone and have some quiet time to myself to think about how to best fix the situation. Around when I turned ten, my sister decided that it was time, now that we were older, that we had separate rooms, so she moved down into the basement, and still sleeps there to this day.
      Now that I'm older, and through the process of getting more mature, I have learned that being alone and being quiet is a very helpful thing. Sometimes all we need is just to be with ourselves for a while to figure things out. 
      And with all of this, and me saying that being alone is my "Boo Radley" Scout's experience is still quite different from mine in a way, and the same in some ways too. I learned something about the world by being alone and Scout learned something about the world through many people, most of all, Boo Radley. There are many ways to learn things, and sometimes it's not what you learn but how you learn it that matters.