I must make something else real besides this life. I cannot stand this wringing, clinging sadness everywhere inside me, surrounding me, throughout me in every breath, and it deepens day by day. I am entrenched and lost, and Mommy in her own private hell has other things on her mind. If I cross her mind at all, it’s not concern for me or love or anything like that she feels. It’s resentment that I am young and physically healthy and someday I’ll be able to leave her, but where will I go? Who will want me?
Why is everything falling apart like this—like pieces of us crashing down to the ground as we ride on a train speeding out of control to a destination. But where? Why won’t it stop? Why can’t it stop even for just a day or two so I can just sit still with my arms around my knees and look at ants crawling in the dirt, so I can tell the world how angry I am, so I can stand up and say that you can’t speed me on like this. You have to give me my daddy back, or give me something, even a scrapbook to hug close to my heart and tuck under my pillow, something other than this on and on, this screaming in the house and me marching in step through the seasons, the snow, the rain, the beautiful sunshine. March, march, march, sick or well. Pause to vomit if you really must, but pick yourself up and get to school to sit in a desk and listen and write and regurgitate and march back home to hope the door isn’t locked, to hope Mommy isn’t mad, but to know she will be, to sit at the table and pound holes in the top with the tip of your pen through the tablecloth because she is screaming and you can’t think, and the TV’s blaring and the phone is ringing, and the radio’s going, and you are ashamed because the table, the sleek Danish Modern table, was the last piece of furniture Daddy bought in the last year he was alive, actually it was the only piece of furniture you ever saw him buy, and now you’ve ruined it. It can’t be fixed. Nothing can be fixed, and there is no escape.
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