Don't Lose Your Way

Prologue

        As a child I was weak, but that was to be expected. I weaseled into things and weaseled out, groveled and pleaded for attention, love, or whatever I so desperately needed at that particular moment. I was subservient and an insignificant speck compared to the rest of the people in the world, but my family worshipped me. I was the firstborn and only child of my parents, so it was natural for this to happen. I got the things I asked for, whatever I asked for, and they treated me like any parents would treat their young child.

            Things started to change. During my fifth year, when I was sent to school, my parents began to work full-time again. I took the bus to school along with about forty other students of various ages. I was not one to make friends, being far more interested in my drawings and not yet having fully grasped society’s impeccable need for language. I could speak, of course, but I preferred not to, resorting to other ways of expressing myself. Most of the time I would sit alone in a corner, exactly how I wanted to be, unaware of the world until the adults around me forced socialization upon me. They would often express their worries about my silence and detachment from the group to my parents, but their arguments had no sustainable evidence that it affected my mental state or learning. I was very intelligent, my parents having raised me to be so.

            After school I was sent to the house of my grandmother. She was a very sweet elderly lady, the mother of my mother. I had no other living grandparents. She spoiled me as my parents had, when she was awake. She liked to fall asleep watching reruns of her favorite soap operas, leaving me to wander around her house alone until my mother or father came to pick me up after work.

            Halfway through this new point in my life, I had gotten restless. My parents no longer catered to me as dedicatedly as they had in previous years, and my peers at school bored me, as did my sleep apneic grandmother. I wandered outside farther than my preset parameters, I played with things I wasn’t supposed to touch. This led to my eventual and eminent demise.

            In my weakest moment, I made a deal to save my life and the life of a loved one. I had found an ancient box of matches hidden in a corner drawer of my grandmother’s kitchen. Of course, being curious, I began to play with them. It will come as no surprise when I tell you the old house quickly caught ablaze. My grandmother, fast asleep and unable to be awoken, was too heavy for me to even attempt dragging to safety. Phoning 911 seemed a foreign concept to my introverted self, especially since I was the one to blame for this mess. As all hope fell away and the flames licked hot around me, she appeared.

            I can still remember how in awe I was of her beauty and grace, how words slipped off her tongue like honey and made me believe that everything was completely fine. Time had frozen, flames had turned cold against my arms and legs. She smiled down at me, her blue diamond eyes closing. She stuck her hands in the back pockets of her jeans and crossed her high-booted ankles as she leaned down to look at me. Her hair was chocolate falling around her shoulders. Out from her collared shirt hung a glittering necklace that would have splayed across her chest if she were standing upright. Looking at this tall, magnificent woman, I knew that I wanted nothing more than to be exactly like her. I thought she could not get any more perfect.

            She gave me a choice. I could follow my fate and burn in the flames I had started alongside my grandmother, dooming us both. The second option this woman presented was that she stop the flames and revert the home back to normal, like nothing had happened. No one would ever have any knowledge of what had happened, and my grandmother and I would be safe. That option came with a price that seemed lesser than death to myself at five years. The woman would take me as her host for as long as she saw fit, and I was to do her bidding. She worded in a way so that it sounded like something of an honor or privilege, but I needed no fancy wording to coax me into accepting. I had already decided.

            I grew up with her as my guide. She lived inside me, teaching me to kill and thieve and lie. When I was ten she moved me on from petty crimes to settling her own personal vendettas, and after that she did with me what she pleased.

            At seventeen I am strong. I live a life dependent yet independent from my guide. How I live is kill or be killed, fight rather than flight. She gives me everything I want; lovers, wealth, excitement. Anything I ask for, I get. It is not unlike the relationship I once had with my parents as a child.

            At seventeen I am strong, I say, but I am still subservient. She still bends me to her will in every way imaginable. I am unable to escape her. She feeds me lies that I am forced to believe, lest I face the torturous consequences of going against her will. I think I am strong, but I am not. I am still the week five year old that accepted a deal with hellish consequences trapped in a seventeen year old body. Yet each day that five year old is fighting against her, trying to push her out. Getting stronger. That five year old whispers the same words my guide told me while making the deal, yet now their meaning has changed. They give me strength.

            Don’t Lose Your Way.