Never Enough

Chapter One

Trigger warnings.

I've always wanted to know how to fly.

When I was little, I'd lie in my back yard, watching as birds flew right over me. It was spectacular. I never understood the creatures, but oh how in that moment I wanted to know so much more that what I already knew.

They seemed so free. Just able to flap their wings and go off. Off into the unknown of this world.

While I stayed trapped, watching them from afar.

My fascination with birds grew the older I become, and there wasn't a moment I wasn't outside, doodling them in my sketchbook as they came along.

I tuned out what was happening inside the house, inside my very own head.

All that mattered were the birds.

When I turned eleven, I had to watch them from my bedroom window. My mom didn't want for me to end up wondering off.

I felt like I was trapped in a cage of four walls.

Night after night I was forced to hear screaming and crying from down stairs as I huddled in my bed, encasing myself in the protection of my blankets.

After a while, my mother became lost to the world, lost to me. I'd come home with a black eye, from being constantly harrassed at school, and she just laid in bed, telling me to scram, that she had a headache.

I blamed all of my problems on her from that moment on. I was so angry. She was my mother, wasn't she supposed to help me? To protect me?

My father didn't start really abusing me until he saw my mother wasn't going to fight back any longer.

I remember him coming home drunk that night like it was only yesterday. I could still smell the exact way the whiskey mixed with his sweat when he got close to my face.

"You're pathetic." He had spat in my face before slapping me, hard. Tears had begun to fall down my cheeks then, and I wanted so much more than to be outside. To be a bird.

"You're supposed to be my son, but you can't even take up for yourself. " He made me turn around, and at the sound of him taking off his belt made me cry harder.

"Shut up boy!" He growled viciously, causing me to choke on fear. He strikes the belt against my back like a whip, causing me to shriek in pain. 

"Count." He stated, no emotion in his voice. "Shut up and fucking count."

I swallowed a sob, muttering a measly "one" before he brought it back down upon my back once more. And so it continued. 

Continued till I was on the verge of blacking out and not being capable of counting any more. 

I fell over when he finally stopped, curled into a fetal position as I laid in my own blood.  

I was left there, for my wounds to heal on there own. I was able to stay out of school the following day, but the beatings after that I was forced to go, or more of a punishment for me.

I stopped going outside, I stopped watching the birds. I stopped.. believing. 

The day my mother died was the first time I ever cut myself. 

I went into her room to bring her food, only to see her lifeless body hanging from the ceiling fan. But I didn't dare cry, for then I was thirteen, and knew better than to cry in this house. 

For a week all my father did was blankly stare at a wall. I fed him everyday, urged him to read the newspaper. 

I hated my father, but he was all I had left. I couldn't lose him too. Little do I know I did lose him. Long before any of this.