Fighting Wayward

Chapter 2

  "Don't you FUCKING WALK AWAY FROM ME, YOU MISERABLE BITCH!"

  Covering my ears, I sat huddled underneath the desk built into one of the walls of my room. I tried not to listen to my mom and dad spend another evening fighting about the doom and gloom life they'd created by being bound through marriage and having decided to have kids.

  I could hear my mother hissing through her teeth between the sounds of her jangling keys as she picked them up. "Don't you dare talk to me like that. I am not going to subject myself to this. Get your head straight, or I am moving on with my life."

  And there it was. The threat of divorce that had become a regularly ready grenade tossed out during every spat between the two.

  When I was younger I used to walk into the middle of the battleground, with tears brimming my eyes, asking if they were getting divorced. This used to be what put a hault to their spats, until it wasn't anymore. Instead my fears and concerns became another aggravation, and I would end up getting in trouble for interrupting them, so I learned to stay put in my room through the shattering of glasses and all of the screaming fits filled with various threats.

  When those keys jangled though, it caused my ears to perk up because now I knew it was time to begin searching for an emergency exit. Neither of my sisters were home, and once my mother left my father's focus would more readily hone in on me.

  The front door slammed, and that's when I burst into action. Slipping on my converse and tossing my cd player into my backpack was all I needed to do before I began making my way to my bedroom window.

  My window was at the front of our one story home all the way to the far left, so all I needed to do was wait for the headlights to pass by, showing my mom wouldn't see me removing the screen to leave.

  I poked my head out of the window enough to make sure the front yard was clear before hopping over the rose bushes strategically planted below. I took a solemn look around my room wondering how my life had become filled with so much fear when it was once so full of joy. As I was sliding the glass back down I heard the stomping through what I assumed was the hall as my dad shouted my name.

  SHIT.

  All I could do was take action and make a run for it. I was flying down the sidewalk without looking back, praying I didn't fall and bust my knees or face. Panicked to the extent where I couldn't possibly consider the consequences to this decision that would come later, I knew I needed to get as far away from that house as I could.

  It wasn't until I made it to the end of the avenue, nearly one block away from the elementary school, that I slowed down enough to realize my face was wet from crying. Finding excuses and escapes from my house was becoming the most time consuming hobby. I just needed to be able to breathe again, and this crushing weight on my chest that was my family falling apart, was ruining me.

  I could feel my entire life being consumed with this sense of forboding, as if things were becoming hopeless. Each day took forever to get through and I no longer saw how things were ever going to get better. Through it all, I began losing my sense of self and didn't like what I was turning into.

  I kept walking up to the school, thrumming with a jerky and paranoid energy, until I got to the fence and scaled it so that I could spend some time on the swings by myself.

  I may be 13 now, nearing the end of my eigth grade year, but when I was soaring through the air holding onto those chains it could help me forget about the metaphorical ones that I could feel wrapped around me each day that I spent stuck at that house. Allowing myself to be engulfed by my prior innocent enjoyment of the little things allowed for me to experience a time when I felt safe, loved, and free.