What Now ⇔ Muke ✓

[25] Happy Birthday

Warning: Discusses sensitive topics that are triggering. Please be careful if you read. I love you.

MICHAEL

Birthdays were never celebrated in my house. At least not after my mother died. They weren't ever seen as important, just another passing day that I would struggle through, clawing at the dirt and grabbing onto anything with stability within reach. I can't remember the number of times that my birthday came and went without my father saying a word, sparing not a glance towards my direction.

When I was younger, just a few years after my mother passed, my father was still raw. Still hurting. He was too emotional to bother with taking care of me, and I remember thinking that was the worst. The ignorance. I couldn't stand it. I had to learn how to cook meals, burning my fingers on the stove and accidentally drawing blood by slicing onions. I would set the plate in front of my father and beg him to eat, beg him to give any sign that he is alive. But he would sit there, that emotionless glare set into his face and he wouldn't touch it. He wouldn't thank me. I would sit across from him and eat my food quietly and try to get past the tension in the room. I never could.

He would ignore my birthday when it came. He wouldn't look at me. He wouldn't talk to me. That was before he started up his drinking.

When he started drinking, he lost all emotional connection to my mother. He stopped mourning and turn to alcohol instead. I didn't blame him at first. He seemed better when he was drunk, at the time. He just passed out a lot, and that gave me time to clean the house and pick up groceries from town without him bothering me with his glares. I didn't mind it. He already withdrew me from school anyways, it wasn't like I had anyone to hide him from.

But he began getting angry when he drank. He began yelling at me from the kitchen and shutting me in my bedroom. It hurt. A lot. It's hard to listen to your father scream the most horrible insults at your face when you're only thirteen years old. I wasn't used to it. I was already grown into being ignored. I didn't like being yelled at.

But one day, when I was scraping together some ingredients for a small dinner that night, he came home drunk and stumbled right up to me. I didn't know what to expect. I expected words. Hurtful words. I knew they would sink into the fleshy skin of my heart and start an infection there, but I wasn't expecting it when his fist flew up to ram against my jaw.

It was with such force. Such pure anger, and I flew back and my side hit the edge of our kitchen table, stabbing a bruise into my ribs. I remember him yelling. I remember his fist. I remember him kicking me. I remember me begging him to stop, my hands covering my tear stained face as I sobbed out pleads to him, desperate for him to stop.

I remember red. Lots of red.

I hate the color red.

After that it only got worse, really, and I found myself staring at the mirror in my room, undressed and gazing at the bruises and cuts littering my body. I saw my gross hair and my ugly eyes and my discolored skin. My father's words repeated in my head like a death trap, and I couldn't get rid of it. It played and replayed in my mind with a haunting quality, and I found myself sitting in the corner of my room with my hands over my ears, screaming silently for help while my father passed out from drinking in the den.

I figured that there must have been a reason why he said all that hurtful stuff to me. There must be a reason why he smacked me and kicked me and shoved me against the wall. I felt worthless, just like he told me I was.

I deserved pain. I deserved it. I told myself this with the utmost sincerity, and I found myself pushing on my bruises to make them swell. I found myself tearing the cuts from the broken beer bottles so that the blood would drip down my legs and flash to me bright red. I hated it. I hated it, and that's why I loved it.