HERO SYNDROME

❝I Had A Fighting Chance❞

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t r i g g e r

w a r n i n g

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No one was home when I finally stumbled in. The entire house was quiet and I worried that Mom and Max were out searching for me. I reached for my phone to let them know I was home, but quickly remembered my phone was in a dumpster somewhere.

I groaned and tried to calm my nerves. "Maybe they're here." I said to myself.

Despite the fact that both the cars were gone, I still ventured upstairs. I tried mom's room first since we were at least still on speaking terms. I checked inside and it was empty. Her tv on but on mute. Then her disappointed eyes flashed in my mind.

The way she had looked at me when she dropped me off at school and when she picked me up afterwards. She smiled and tried to assure me that everything would be okay. But she looked so disappointed in me.

I should have told the truth from the beginning. I never should've shut Max out and made my mother lie as well. It was my fault and even if mom never admitted it, she knew this was my mistake. Not my mental state, mine. It was something I could control and I chose not to.

I closed her door and checked Max's. Not because I believed he would be there, but because I really wanted to be around him. His room looked untouched. Clothes thrown on the floor, on his desk, and on his bed. His moon shaped night light was turned on, even though he swore years ago he wasn't scared of the dark.

Taking in his familiar scent, I fell onto his bed and laid there. I stared at his ceiling and thought it would make me cry. But I ran out of tears. I laid there and felt it all hit me at once.

The shame, the fear, the anger. Everything I had failed to bottle up in the last few months had finally come out in the span of a very long weekend. I was the captain of this disaster. My own worst enemy. With no one else to blame, I laid in the decisions I made.

Soon, I found myself fighting my sleep. If I couldn't dream, I didn't want to leave then. But I did, my eyelids growing heavier with each passing blink, until the darkness enveloped me.

The first thing I noticed was that I was barefoot, only wearing a hospital gown and a medical bracelet. The walls around me were all white, and at the end of the corridor was a door. I ran to it, and fell through like Alice did in the rabbit hole. I fell on my knees and glanced around the room.

It was our living room. Everything was the exact same, except for a man standing with his back turned to me. Slowly his arm reached into his back pocket and retrieved a gun.

My stomach twisted up in a lost and found dread. I had known this before. I had lived this before.

The man placed the gun on the coffee table and turned to me. Fear seized my movements and I was cemented to the ground, watching my father. He smiled in that familiar way. There but not really, he smiled from the place he resided in, inside his head. But he wasn't looking at me, I quickly realized.

A little girl with an identical hospital gown as mine, stood next to me. She was me, at the age of five or six.

This wasn't right, I realized. It didn't happen like this. I was older when he did this to me. I was old enough to understand how sick he was. This didn't happen to that little girl. She still saw him as her hero. She didn't know, she wouldn't understand.

"Don't do this, please!" I begged him, trying to move. But he ignored me and gestured for the little girl to follow him. "Don't go, please go back to your room! Phoenix get away from him!" I kept yelling but still it was as if I wasn't there.