lost boys | jeongcheol

|stranger|

"Family's all you got. Whether it's the family you were born with or the family you create."

- 1 -
|stranger|

My shoulders were pushed back against the brick wall of the alleyway. The man who's hands gripped the fabric of my hoodie let out a sneer as his drunken eyes scanned my face. I breathed in his putrid scent: one of liquor and nicotine with a hint of women's perfume.

I looked away, my eyes half lidded and my features slack. He wanted the attention that I wasn't giving him and because of my nonchalant attitude, he tightened his hold on me and pushed my body even further into the wall.

My head was spinning and my body was beginning to ache. Even so, I couldn't bring myself to reject his actions or fight back. I just stood there and took it like a bitch, exactly the way I'd been forced to when I was younger. I knew that's all I'd ever be if I kept up my self destructive lifestyle: an idiot kid who took shit from everyone. My mind along with my body had been ruined and I had the constant, torturous feeling of hopelessness. I was weak and puny so what was the point of ever fighting back? I'd always loose, so why bother trying? Binge drinking at four in the morning and going days at a time without sleep had turned me into a submissive zombie, letting myself be broken time and time again and doing nothing to stop it until the damage was already done. I let the man touch me, get close to my face until I could taste his warm breath on my lips. I let him use me, just like I did with everyone else who'd hurt me in the past.

But that was in highschool. It had already been four years since I dropped out. It seemed like an eternity had passed, but even in that amount of time I hadn't been able to change myself like I desperately needed to. I was still constantly relapsing and it was getting harder by the day to keep myself from the temptation of reverting back to what was familiar to me.

I was sixteen when I ran away from home. My dad was a doctor, but considering the amount of patients he'd lost, he didn't seem like a very good one. I adopted my drinking habits from him, too. Whenever he'd had a bad surgery or operation, he'd get drunk and call in sick the next day only to drink even more. I was always the outlet of his guilt and anger, but never once did he hit me. His torture was physiological. He was the reason I felt so hopeless. He was the one who had ruined me, and I'm sure he prided himself on keeping my body scratch free while my heart and soul were tattered like rags.

After I left, I tried getting jobs at restaurants and shops around town but there were always too many risks. I never gave away my real name and the fact that I didn't have any school or birth records was kind of a red flag, but at that point my father was still looking for me so I couldn't risk people knowing my name. That wasn't even the worst part. When I started to realize that people weren't hiring me because of how suspicious I was, I committed blatent identify theft using an old classmate's name and ended up getting caught. That was my first ever notable crime. Everything after that took a turn for the worst, and I knew there was no going back.

After trying to get a job and failing, I was constantly moving from building to building in order to hide from my father. I'd stay with friends occasionally, but that got boring pretty quick. Sometimes I'd stay in hotels but I always ended up leaving at some point in the night due to my paranoia of being found and dragged back to my old home. My mindset then was that I'd rather starve to death on the streets than live in that cold, empty house with my dad. Even when I slept in a stranger's home or in alleyways, I never felt as lonley as I did getting home from elementary school and seeing him sitting at the living room table burried in paperwork. I'd show him my drawings or tell him about my day, knowing damn well that he wasn't listening but having no one else to speak to. I loved him blindly then because that's just the way it was supposed to be. I was an idiot, but I guess the fact that I'm still dwelling on it means I haven't really changed.