Side.

Side. - Chapter 1

Chapter 1. 

Several pastures, farms, bridges, buildings and more passed by. The sky was grey, but there weren’t any dark clouds. My eyelids were heavy, ready to fall shut, but I already knew I couldn’t sleep, not now. I guess I was too nervous. My long, dark hair loosely fell over my shoulders, the front strands of hair being shoved behind my ears. I pulled the end of my sleeves over the pale palms of my hands and rested my chin in my hand while my elbow leaned on the edge of the car door.

Today would be the first day of my new life.  I wanted to forget everything that happened before, there weren’t that many good things that happened in my life. I wish my life was normal, but it wasn’t. I never met my own father. He left my mom when she got pregnant from me. Since I got 6 years old, my mom started drinking. First it started with two glasses a night, I didn’t really see the problem since I was really young. Gradually she started drinking more and more and after a while she even started the day with a glass of liquor. So since then I actually took care of myself, and sometimes for her. When I was 8 years old, I told her how upset I felt about the fact of her not paying attention to be and not taking care of me. She cried for a few hours straight and promised me it would never happen again. And a short while later, she got a new boyfriend, called Richard. At the beginning he was nice, and I was glad he was there for my mom and I, he even wanted us to move in with him because he’d move to another city. But after a few months he started hitting her and told her she wasn’t worth it, to me, he stayed nice. But I hated him for what he did to my mother. Fortunately, my mom was brave enough to leave him, and he left Detroit, the place I was born.

My mom really stopped drinking since Richard left us, and I was proud of her. Even though it was hard for to not to drink the pain away, she stayed sober, for me. A few years went by, and everything was great. I thought nothing could break us ever again, since we got along very well, but only when she wasn’t alcoholic. Sometimes I asked where my father was, because I missed him, even though I never met him. My friends told me and their classmates what they had done during the weekend. A lot of them said they went to the Zoo with their daddy, or they baked cookies, or he taught them how to swim. I wanted those moments too, even though I didn’t know how I’d experience them, because I just never did.

But my mother always changed the subject, she never, ever told something about my dad. Only one thing, “You look like him.” I was glad when she told me that, because I thought she’d tell me more soon, but she never did. I had asked her countless times to tell me where my father was, if I even had a father, or just to tell me about him, but she never spoke about him. Until one night.

I was 15 years old, when I came home late in the afternoon from having a movie night with my friends. When I opened the door of the house I shared with my mom, all the lights were turned off and it was completely dark.  I called out for her before hearing her laughing loudly. I ran to the living room, to see her sitting on the ground, her back against the wall, with an empty bottle in her hand and one scattered on the floor, glass everywhere. It was obvious that she was drunk again, and it hurt, a lot. She broke her promise.

Gradually she got depressed, and I never knew what the reason was. But because I already knew it wouldn’t work between us, at least not for that moment, I went to a boarding school in Bloomfield Hills, near Detroit. I lived there, on a campus and went to school there, so it was quite easy, I didn’t need to drive for half an hour from home to school. My mother went to a special clinic and went into therapy, to get helped on her depression and drinking problem.

I went to that school for more than one year, when my mom called me to tell me she wanted me to come home, because she was ‘healed’. I went home and was glad to see my mom again. I had missed her even though we called every week. Suddenly she broke down in tears and told me she couldn’t take care of me anymore and she wanted me to live a real life every teenager has, so we decided to search for foster parents.