My mind is a blank canvas waiting to be filled, my emotions are a hurricane trying to slow down, my ideas are just that, thoughts that never will become reality.

One day in the late 1980s a woman went into labor and walked all ten miles to the nearest hospital. She couldn’t afford a cab. She knew she would have a girl and she knew that girl would have a hard road ahead of her. But the woman never wanted her baby to have a life like she had or know what she did to keep that baby alive. She wanted her daughter to become everything she couldn’t, everything she wanted to be. She wanted that baby to be able to follow her dreams not those of the people around her. The baby was born five hours later and became an orphan two hours after that when a man came to her mother’s room and smuggled the life out of her. That man was never caught but his life was cut short from a heart attack two years after that, he never knew what life his daughter would have but he was not sorry that she would never know her true parents.

That baby ended up being raised by one of her single aunt’s that felt marriage was trivial and if a husband could kill his wife over an affair there was no reason to ever get married. She was happy on her own, but this story is not hers, nor of the girl who lost her parents. For she was an idea of mine, a thought of what I wished could have happened to my parents, to lose them and have an aunt who would side with me on the trivial reality of love. To have a happy family, one not tainted with hate and a sister to dumb for life. To never have to hear the screams of her parents arguing, nor to watch her father walk out on her and her little family and leave her crying with her cat who was sitting in a small square cardboard drawer that was yet to be fit with the rest.

To never have to worry about the hurt her sister felt to affect her and make her heart shrivel to the size of a pea. To never feel that love fake and only a figment of a romantic’s dream. Especially to never have to bottle up her feelings and only cry when no one was watching for fear that she thought others would think she was weak. I was tainted and still am with the guilt of what I could have changed if I spoke up instead of crying in the corner. Nothing is safe for me and all I ever wanted was ripped from my grasp and replaced with torn pieces of my past that will one day fall together to make a story, a thread of who I am for all the world to see. Now I sit here and think of all I could’ve changed and the life I could have had if I protected it more carefully.