Brightness in My Life

O N E 👽

[WRITTEN: March 8,2018]

     "Everyone has a little darkness in their life, but with that darkness comes light." That was something my mother told me the night my father had died. I was only seven years old the night he died and I didn't understand as to why my mother had told me that. To me it always felt like my life was forever going to be dark now that my best friend was gone. It was like that for a very long time. 

    By the time I was 12-years-old my mother was still mourning over my father's death. Unless she was working, she spent most of her time sleeping. We didn't have a relationship anymore because she refused to even look at me. According to her I looked too much like my father. It was clear to me that she was depressed.

   In those days and even until now, I had realized how much my mother had contradicted herself. Well at least that's how it felt. I thought that the passing of my father was the darkness and my mother was supposed to be the light to make everything better again. It only got darker the older I got. Sometime in the middle of the year my mother had committed suicide.

   The passing of my father had gotten too much for her. She wrote on her suicide note and apologized to me. She said she was sorry for the pain she has caused me all those years, and how she wished she could have been a better mother to me. She also told me that one day I would find someone that I would love just as much as she loved my father. Maybe then I would understand why she did what she did.

   Since then I promised to myself that if I were to ever find love, I would always be my first priority. The last thing I wanted was to end up like my mother. After my mother was officially announced dead, I was sent to a foster home. Neither of my parents had family that was alive or that lived in the United States. So I had no choice but to go.

   I spent four years in child protective services, going almost all around the United States. Family to family and neither of them felt like home to me. Moving around so much had caused some problems for me. I was too old to be adopted, and too young to live on my own. By the fifth foster home I was diagnosed with Persistent Depressive Disorder.

   A depressive disorder term used to describe two conditions, dysthymia and major depression. This was one of the main reasons I was switched from home to home. I just had my days where I wanted to be alone, and in my case was the worst decision to make. There was many times where my former foster parents had walked in on me attempting anything from self harm to over-the-counter drug overdose. This always caused me to lash out my foster parents.

    I was a dysfunctional teen, and in everyone else's eyes I had no future. I has one last foster home before I left. They had five biological and two foster kids, three counting me. My foster siblings were two 15-year-old twins boys, Jake and Max. Jake and Max were taken from their parents as babies and have been living in foster care practically all their lives.

   Even though they were three years apart from me, I got along with them pretty well. After all it was us three against seven other people in the house. Living in that house didn't even feel like home to us. It was more like a job. We spent most of our time doing house work around the house, while the other five kids did what they pleased.

But that never stopped me from doing what I wanted; I did almost everything behind their back. Because if they did ever find out the things that I did, I would be skinned alive. Being in that home I was always in some kind of trouble. I was desperately trying to do whatever I could to move to another home.

My foster dad was the one to enforce the rules, so when the rules were broken you had to face him. Now I'm not gonna lie, he was a very intimidating person. From a first glance you would automatically assume that he couldn't hurt a fly. If you were one of his close friends, he would always put up a front that he was always happy and that we were all happy as well. But the second we got home it's like he was a whole new person.

   He went from having the best time of his life to instantly wanting to kill you if you even made a single noise. After all everyone is a different person behind closed doors. When my foster dad was home from work he would scan around the house to make sure everything was spotless. Everytime he would walk into my room, he always had this look in his eye like he was planning a murder. And he always asked the same question with the same deep monotone voice; "Did you do your chores?"

  This time I was feeling risky and decided to test the waters. I spent the whole day in my room, boycotting for my rights in this house. I didn't have to do chores for people who weren't even my own blood. I blasted my music high enough to push my foster mom over the edge; she hated loud noises. When she had enough of my foolery she would bang on my door, only making me to play my music louder.

   This may just seem like something any other teen would do, but knowing my foster mom she would definitely blow this way out of proportion. My foster mom and I were never on good terms, I was always finding myself in some type of confrontation with her.