Falling In Love With The Past

Chapter One: In Which She Returns

Do you know that feeling? In which your whole world seems to crumble beneath your feet and there's nothing you can do to stop it. The emotions that come with it: vulnerability, humiliation, despondency, helplessness, misery. The betrayal that comes after you have let people into your life, your heart, and what that took from you. You let them see the most vulnerable parts of you, let them know your weaknesses, the things you love, only for them to use them against you, to leave you regardless. You feel sad at the beginning, we all do it's normalacy for the human heart. But, after the pain and sadness subsides, there's only anger and hate left. We are left with thirst for revenge, thirst for justice, the person who we were before overcome and transformed into someone who will stop at nothing, whose only desire is to see all the people that did her wrong to suffer the way that she did. To shed the same tears, to have the same doubts, to not be able to breathe from the torment, not be able to sleep, to wish for death instead of living. 

For the last 17 years of my life, I've been trampled on, taken advantage of,  told I was nothing. I never had support from anyone, an ounce of love, an act of kindness, the ones who did were all fake. My biological parents abused me. They never wanted me I was just an accident from their foolishness. They hated me, her and him both. They couldn't live with each other, always insulting one another, fighting and each took their misery and fury out on me since I was the only thing that binded them. They hit me, made me bleed, I would cry and it would only get worse. He, sexually abused me and she did nothing. They yelled at me, they told me it was all my fault. When I was eight, for better or worse, he left and never came back. She got worse, she drank her sorrows away, drugged herself to forget all the things that happened around her, probably also to forget she had a daughter from the man who had left her. She began to leave me alone every night in the apartment. She would come back every morning without so much a glance at me, only to open a can of food for me and send me to school. 

School only got worse as I got older. All the kids bullied me, I was too fat, my teeth too yellow, I was too short, too ugly, too lonely, too poor, too weird, too broken to be friends with, too unbearable to play with. I had no one and all I could do at recess and lunch was hide in the bathroom, alone and sobbing, the only thing I knew how to do. The teachers didn't care, the government never paid them enough to worry themselves with the lives of kids like me. They truly were there only to teach and nothing else. The girls, knowing I was there already, came into the bathroom only to mock me, hit me, pull my hair, they ripped the few decent clothes I had and all I could do was cry and put my arms around me as if they could shield me from them. I never told on them, never accused them for fear. Every time they hit me, every time they yelled, and pushed me around I would see him and her in my mind, and remember all they things they did to me. Remember the consequences that followed if I ran away or defended myself. 

Going home was better than being at school but even at home I was plagued with thoughts.  I hated school. I hated my teachers. I hated the kids. I hated him and her. I hated myself. I hated the world. I was lonely, no one could hear my cries so I screamed and screamed till my voice went hoarse. I tortured myself and asked myself, "Why can't I have a mom and dad like the kids at my school? Parents that love me. Why can't I be like them, happy. Loved," I cried for hours on end. One day after school, I had forgotten to close the door and unleashed all the emotions that I kept pent up during the day, and at one point I felt a small tap on my shoulder. I couldn't help but flinch. I looked up and there was a black haired little boy, my age, with the sweetest chocolate brown eyes. Apparently he had been walking by the street, had heard me and walked in only to find me with puffy red eyes and tear-stained cheeks. 

Matteo was his name and he distracted me by telling me who we was. He had lived with his father but his father was ill and passed away. So, he was forced to live with his mother, Karla. Karla was our neighbor and was coincidentally her  friend. I asked him why I had never seen him before, and he had explained he was homeschooled. He continued with his story and described to me every moment he had lived. As I look back on it, Matteo told me all the things his mother did to him, that she hit him and abused him, everything about him, in an effort to not make me feel alone. Although, Karla was more caring with Matteo than she was with me, at least Karla acknowledged that her son existed. Karla sometimes even looked after me. From that day forward, things didn't get better for me, but I had made a friend. Matteo and me typically stayed together all the time, we played, he consoled me and helped through the days that became too much for me.