Hated

Memories Filled with Hate

I wake up. Opening my eyes is one of the last things I want to do right now. I’d rather just crawl into the corner and die alone. The pain feels worse when someone else gives it to me. I only give them what they want.

My eyes start to close again, as though they want me to sleep. Sleeping might be one of my favorite things, but I don’t want to do it right now. I look over at my clock. 6:07. Twenty-three minutes until my mom gets home, unless I’m lucky.

My mom works as a banker, something no one thought a drunk would do. She always wanted to be a dance instructor. Those dreams flew out the door with flying colors when she couldn’t stand up straight for two years.

When I was eight years old, five years ago, my mother was driving us home from school. She had just left the bar where her boyfriends love to hang out. She called them her “male-friends,” but they were probably paying her.

She forgot Johnny and I often. If we didn’t get picked up by 4:00, it meant “mommy was busy” and we had to walk the two miles back to our house. It was better than listening to her scream at us for ten minutes, always losing her way back to our dark, blue house. Not very hard to miss at the end of a cul de sac.

The day she drove us home, she had been drinking badly. She didn’t want to admit she couldn’t be a good mother to us, and our fathers hadn’t seen us since we were one and two. Two blocks from home she closed her eyes for what probably felt like a second. Seconds turned to minutes, which then turned to……

She hit a telephone pole, ironic as hell, but true. The cops never knew about us. I freaked out, grabbed my brother, and ran back home. We weren’t hurt. We left with a scratch here and there, but nothing too serious. The first nice thing that has happened to us since we were born. We escaped perfectly. I wish I would have died.

My mom got the worse of it. It was her karma for being a jerk to us our entire life. Her legs were pinned down by the steering wheel for hours before some man called the police. She wasn’t paralyzed, but she did have some nerve damage. I was too young to really know what happened. After all of that, we were sent to our grandmother’s house. She never liked children.