Penn State University.
Home to the craziest sorority girls, most obnoxious athletes, and a girl trying to start all over.
Aurora Augustine has been homeschooled her entire life because it's what her father wanted from her. In fact, she's always doi...
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Aurora Augustine
I never felt like I belonged anywhere except the walls of my bedroom. It wasn't a bad thing for people who never felt trapped by anything ever, but I was a person suffocated by my thoughts so those walls of my bedroom weren't therapy to me– they were a mental institution.
When I was six, I started to paint on my wall. I started small with stick figures– all girls of course. Not because I wanted a friend or a sister. But because I wanted a mother. I wanted a motherly figure in my life to attach myself to.
Don't worry.
I didn't attach myself to a wall of cement that was cold, heartless, and unattachable. I couldn't attach myself to the wall unless I had a hammer and nails. However, the hammer and nails would've felt more pleasurable than the cracks in my heart that formed every time I brought myself in front of my mother– only for her to turn me away.
Just like the wall.
When I was seven, I begged my father to let me attend public school. I wanted friends. I wanted someone to talk to. I never asked why I wasn't allowed outside of the house, besides when I was attached to my father's hip at work. He said no, and handed me a movie. He told me to make friends with my television. Yet another cold, hard, and inanimate object.
When I was eight, I blew out my birthday candles wishing for my mother to celebrate with me. But she too never left the house. She never brushed her hair. She never took care of herself. She never did anything during that year. She quickly became skin and bones.
When I was nine, I filled the walls of my bedroom with the faces of people whom I had never met other than in my imagination. There, in my bedroom, I had conversations with people who never responded, never reached out to me, and never cared.
When I was ten, I was finally allowed out of the house. A family reunion with my father. There I met a cousin who introduced me to the world of books. Yet another world where I could be anyone, anywhere, and any time of the day no matter what my dad said.
When I was eleven, I drew tears on every character I had painted inside of my bedroom because that one time I was allowed out– my mother ran away. It devastated me at the time but looking at it now, nothing changed. What difference would it make if she were here?
