My Cyberbully

Chapter Ten

     Chapter Ten

     Ache surrounded me with malicious barbed wire hands.  The more I thought over everything the tighter they squeezed.  Clutching my pillow I buried my face in its softness.  Nothing appealed to me.  Sight, sound and touch were enemies.  Everything flared the hurt. The problem was that even behind my eyelids the past bled into the present.

     Once upon a time I was part of a family of four.  It wasn’t an easy time because my mother was single and raising my sisters and me on her own.  She had very little help except from the government and I realize people who don’t know the entire story will sit back and bicker about how they are paying for our welfare.  I don’t need to hear that crap. 

     When I was five, maybe six, my memory is fuzzy, my mother left my father.  He was the prime example of domestic abuse.  According to my mother he dragged her down a flight of stairs while she was pregnant and hit her in the back with thick pieces of wood.  That was the only thing I remember her telling me, but from what I gather there was a lot more, but again my memory is not the best. 

     To top it all off my father was a gun fanatic.  I do remember he had a large closet filled with rifles, shotguns and handguns of all kinds.  It scared me to be honest.  It was like walking into an alien world of death and destruction.  And since he possessed all these weapons people outside our home became concerned not due to him having so many deadly toys but because he was mentally unstable.

     So my mother was advised to leave him.  My mother was told he might snap and kill us all.  So she left and with the help of social services she made it back to her hometown which was thousands of miles away from this potential threat.

     Now a woman with three children trekking all that way with very little money needed to be recognized as a brave and tough heroine.  She did what she had to do to save her children.  Most women today rather stay by their man and trust me I know of such women, but I won’t get into that now.

     My mother was willing to work.  She wanted to work.  Not long after though my father used one of those guns to end his life and because of that my mom now had survivor’s benefits.  It wasn’t much, but it was something.  It helped get us a home, clothes and food.  And social services told my mom to not get a job or else these benefits would stop, that she would get more if she didn’t work.

     I rolled onto my back.  I didn’t want to think.  Thinking hurt my brain, my heart and my soul.  There was just no escaping it though.  There was no way out of the web spun by people bent on ill intent.