The Battle Within (Discontinued)

Just the Beginning

January 6

     I have never kept a journal, until today. It was a gift years ago for a birthday I don't remember. I thought that now would be a good time to start writing my feelings down somewhere.

     I guess I should write why I am starting this. I want a record, something to go back and read on days that seem hopeless. My past in writing to show that things arn't always so bad. I'm wondering if I should unload now, or share in intervals. Remembering everything now seems too soon, too early to open up the old scars.

     Scars, a permanant reminder of all the mistakes I have made. I have so many, emotionally and physically.

     You would think that the scars I see and feel everyday would bring the most regret, but I find they are just pale reminders. Those I can live with.

     The emotional and spiritual scars, however, haunt me. They cause nightmares that sharply bring me to consciousness; sweating, heart pounding in my ears. Those are the ones I am afraid of.

     I should start from the beginning, where it all began, because that is when the scars started to show.

     It's funny how much I remember so many of the bad aspects of my past, with such sharp clarity it's as if it happened no more than a week ago.

    I was five or six when it started. My mom and Carl, my step father, had moved us out of the projects into a pretty house close to mine and my James' school. I remember walking to school everyday, in all sorts weather.

     Things went well for a few months, everything seemed perfect in that big house. The cheery curtains and white walls made the house seem even bigger and brighter.

     But things wern't perfect. We had little money, and to help pay the bills my mother moved in a room-mate. Looking back now, I know she had to have wanted him from the beginning.

     Adam was loud, crude, and a heavy drinker. It made me uncomfortable to see the way he stared at my mom. He was constantly touching her when Carl was at work. I think another thing that bothered me so much was that my mother encouraged it.

     She wore shorter clothes with lower cuts, and she was always moving in a provocative nature around Adam. To impress him, she started drinking with him.

     At first, it was little amounts. A shot of vodka here, a tall-boy there. But Adam pressured her into more and more. Before I was the age of eight my mother was an alcoholic.

     I remember how she would rather blast her music on the radio and drink with Adam's hands rubbing all over her than help me and James with our homework. I remember James, my poor little brother, asking me for help. I could hardly do my own.

     Later on I had to start cooking for us both. God, I remember one night I had made a box of macaroni and cheese for us both. It was the weekend so we had hardly eaten that day. We decided to split the box.

     After we had eaten Adam had come into the kitchen and looked at the empty box and what little was left in the pot.

     "Damn fat-ass, you couldn't save a spoon-full? There's nothin' to eat in this fucking house you pig!" He had shouted. I started to say that I could make another box, but instead he had grabbed a fistful of my hair and forced me up the stairs.

     "Stay up here and try not to eat the furniture, fat pig." His laugh was cruel and I remember James comforting me, telling me I wasn't any of those things Adam had called me, as I cried all night. And though I wished I could believe him, I knew I was fat. Because from the moment my mother had started drinking I had a feeling that it was because of me, because I wasn't like the perfect skinny girls you saw on TV.

     My problems, I have now realized, came from my mother's lack of affection.

                                                                -Maxx