To The Moon

Part 1; Chapter 1

AUTHOR'S NOTE

Gaaahhh! I hate starting out stories, this first part is incredibly slow; I promise it will get better! This is my first story on Wattpad, I'm making it up as I go along, please comment, vote, and fan if you like it!  :-)

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We both knew it was coming. My father and I. I still wish it was different. I wished it never started out as a normal day. Maybe if it was an off day, leaving wouldn't have seemed so awful. For years I had known that at one point my father wouldn't deal with it anymore, but it took him fourteen years to actually get the courage to stop the madness. This morning the day I left is blurry, but if it never happened, I wouldn't have been here.

The sun shined in through my windows in my mother’s home in the beautiful San Diego, California. Happiness is calling, they say, but the only thing calling me was my dead-beat mother who claimed to have changed her ways. So I went for the summer like my father wanted. 

The last thing I dreamed of was ending up here in the last place I had to flee five years ago. It was hard. Watching my mother come home every night stumbling through the front door while my father took her hand and set her on the couch. Watching my father lock himself in his room and cry himself to sleep. Listening while my mommy, my hero, would walk out the door every night so she could go meet another, younger, man and drink beer all night to forget all of her problems. 

Finally my father had enough. He told me one day to pack all of my things and not to leave anything behind. With his watery blue eyes he urged me to not leave anything behind that I wanted. He said we were going on a very long and special vacation. So, in a pink and yellow polka-dotted suitcase I put all of my clothes and packed all the pictures from my wall into a shoebox. I never said goodbye to any of my friends, it would have taken too long with all of them. The only person I told was Ava. She lived next door and as I was leaving she asked me where I was off to, so I quickly whispered goodbye. 

I never really got to know her. She was one of the quiet, shy kids at school. No one ever invited her to eat lunch with them and she didn't talk in class. The only time I ever really saw her was when she sat under the tree in her backyard and read her books. When I said goodbye she just looked back at me with hollow eyes, like she didn't know who I was anymore. 

I remember my father’s eyes as he drove to the airport. They were big and blue, like the ocean, and they frantically looked from tree to tree and all about us, making sure everything was in order. He hummed shakily to the radio as Jack Johnson played a melody on his guitar. I remember being confused until he said, “You won’t have to worry about Mommy anymore, sweetheart.”

That’s when it hit. We weren’t going on vacation, we were running away. He was taking me from my paradise because my mother couldn’t handle a family of her own. She was too immature -- too irresponsible -- to be a mother to Daddy’s little princess. It took me a little while to realize that she wouldn’t miss us anyways, she would be too drunk to notice, too drunk to care. 

The airport was crowded, filled with all different people. Unusual people, pretty people, worried people, touristy people, and then there was my father and I. We traveled through the crowd swiftly and boarded the first plane we could find that was across the country. Flight 843 to Buffalo, New York.

That was five years ago now. After the first year my mother found out where we were living and began sending letters once a month with a small check and an apology. Each month my father tore everything up and shredded the check. 

I slowly let go of all my friends I had had back in San Diego, as they slowly became blurry in my memories and then they became faceless figures. Names disappeared and with that relationships died out. 

Otherwise it had been comfortable in New York. New relationships blossomed and I had a boyfriend by the time I hit high school.

My new life was shaky when it first started, though. Starting out new was like all your best friends suddenly forgetting who you were. The students would give me blank stares, or curious looks, but most would just turn away when I looked towards them. It was seventh grade, though. Everyone had their friends that they've had since kindergarten and here I came sauntering in on their perfect little lives and friendships. I was the faulty screw that they could do without. One person didn't give me the looks that the others did, I thought he was different. 

He brought me under his wing and guided me to my friendships. He was part of the popular group, and as I became friends with all the people at his lunch table, they began to influence me. One girl dyed her hair darker, so we all started dying our hair. I dyed my hair from it's blonde color to a deep shade of brown. My father didn't know about it when I first did it, but he didn't really mind as long as I was making new friends. 

At school, I was quiet and timid with these new people. They had their friends from kindergarten, and didn't trust me enough for me to open up to them and become myself. My boy introduced me to parties, just the high school kind, but then I started to expand to Universities around the area. My father didn't even know, I would make  excuses and tell him the things that ever father wants to hear. 

My life was practically perfect by my junior year, until the letter came. 

She sent a plea, claiming that life was hard in San Diego without her daughter, and that she needed to see her or she was going to involve the law. My father had no choice but to give me a kiss goodbye and wave to me with watery eyes as I boarded a plane back to San Diego. Happiness is calling, they say; but at that moment, to me happiness looked a lot more like hell.