Iris

15 | questions

     EVERY SECOND that passed seemed to last an eternity. Too long and dull, lacking a specific end and lacking the slightest ounces of light. The tears that had started brimming in my eyes were a thin mask, concealing the bitter truth away from my understanding. And they were so heavy that they fell out without a second thought and shamelessly streamed over my cheeks and onto the picture I had made sure to grasp again within my unsteady grip.

Morgan—or Mrs. Brown, as I used to call her when I lived at the orphanage—was a social worker. A person who had hurt and scolded my three-year-old self on countless days even though she didn't have the right to do so, and a person who had made me believe that she was capable of kicking me out of the orphanage when it was completely out of her power.

She had been the one to find my fosters and to send me away with them. She had said that they were good people. Loving and caring. Gentle and sweet. And a longer list of words my younger self had genuinely smiled at, even though she couldn't understand anything from them, simply because they made her feel safe and loved. And simply because they deceived her into believing that her fosters were going to be the parents she had been longingly dreaming of.

I was a lot younger back then, after all, instantly clinging to whatever words I heard and totally oblivious to the fact that they were nothing but deceptive fragments, their edges sharp and pointed, easily piercing into my heart and rapidly shattering it, along with the hope it held, into tiny crumbles. Ones that painfully made me realise how the sharp edges held nothing but the truth behind the word's meanings; how they were a complete contrast to the horrific reality awaiting me with my fosters.

I swallowed harshly as I let my blurred gaze travel towards the scar that rested upon my arm, and my hazy mind drift back to the day I had gotten it—three years ago. My heart seemed to shatter further, as though Morgan's words had succeeded in penetrating through it all over again. My fosters were so different from the way her words had described them.

They were far from loving and caring. And nothing close to gentle and sweet.

And she wasn't any different from them; she was as bad as them. She hadn't pitied me when I sobbed loudly, screaming until my throat's walls seemed to tear apart, and desperately asking her not to hurt me any further. And she hadn't even shown any signs of regret when I stumbled on my own steps, moving as fast as my feet allowed me to, in an attempt to reach the bathroom where I'd clean the wound she had given me.

All she did was watching everything so quietly. The way James had always done, and the way Claire had always done. She was a friend of theirs, after all; she had spent countless nights with them, drinking and laughing. Talking about everything friends would usually talk about—as I convinced my younger self into believing. Mentioning people I was totally oblivious to, and helping my fosters with cases they described as complicated.

I had once attempted to grasp onto the slurred words they were saying, but Morgan had seen me; her eyes had widened, her words seeming to vanish. I had run rapidly; the way I always did. And I had cowered in the corner of the basement, waiting for invisible arms to appear magically from the walls—to embrace my figure and to protect my fragile body from what I knew was coming.