Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been

Out of all the stories this year, this is the one that managed to keep my attention the best by keeping me on edge throughout the whole story. I read Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been two weeks before the class day for it since it was my groups presentation story, yet when my roommate walked in on me reading it she thought I was stress reading for class because I was that sucked into the story. 

So what about it had me that engaged? Really, I don't know. It was a very odd story, and really dark. It was sad watching Connie force herself to grow up much faster then a girl should. It was sad to watch her far-away dreams and romantic fantasy become a sad, crude reality.  Maybe it’s so heartbreaking because so many girls do that now. It is normal for girls to be pregnant and unmarried in high school, magazine’s sell sex, and youthful girls force themselves to be more sexually mature then they are physically, mentally, or spiritually. Maybe the story is so sad because it can be so convicting to our society.

It reminded me a lot of the Yellow Woman; the whole idea of dream versus awake and myth versus reality. For Connie, the music was her dream. She romanticized life using lyrics and rhythm from songs she loved. Yellow woman lived in a myth she had heard growing up, that myth became her reality. Connie’s myth of the music, became her reality, but in a very ugly way – in a way she never before intended or probably thought possible. Her coming of age was thrust upon her, because she put out the temptation.