Child of Youth

Chapter 2: Sometimes Home is not Where the Heart is

This chapter will be written in first person point of view.

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I've never considered running away from home before. Until maybe the day my mom decided to spank me for disobeying some meaningless rule of hers.

I've been doing my homework assignments in the living room all Saterday morning in May, just as I've been told to. I sharpened my pencil every forty-six seconds, I used my eraser only after each time I cleaned it, and I marked every important phrase with a different shade of a dull highlighter. And yes, my mom happened to stand there, watching me with eagle-cobra like eyes the entire time I was doing it.

She wanted to make sure I did it "properly." My mom had a lot of ideas of what "proper" was and "proper" wasn't, especially if you're only an 11 year old Spanish girl with fragile wrists and dainty toes that were so long and thin they could break if a butterfly so much as sat on them. Like wearing a black dress to dinner and a yellow or white one to breakfast, eating cupcakes on a plate, with a knife and fork, not using my unicorn pen for Math tests and a whole bunch of other nonsense like that.

Sometimes I thought I really was more mature than she was.

Anyways, for the past week and a half I've been obsessed with this movie we went to see in the cinema... Well, a week and a half ago. It was about a lovely and "sexy" young woman running away from home to escape her overweight, arrogant, strict 34 year old husband and hiding herself in a large crater-like hole in the fields near their marble farm mansion. A thunderstorm an earthquake then threw trees, leaves and mud over the opening of the hole, making her unable to ever escape again. She was doomed to die...and that was what I just couldn't get over in my mind.

What if that was me? What if something like that ever happened to me? You can never know and the Bible says God determines our fate. I don't think the manner you die in necessarily reflects how good a person you were in your life. Good people can also be smashed by cars, eaten alive by tigers, or fall from Empire State buildings into oceans with bottoms that never end.

I've always had a fear of death and I didn't know how to overcome it. It's called thanathophobia and my mom had me diagnosed with it by a professional psychologist when I was five.  I also have athazagoraphobia, the fear of forgetting someone or something and also being forgotten. That fear was definitely worse than my thanathophobia, though, which I developed by the age of eight.

The woman's husband went after her in a desperate attempt to show her how he had changed and how he now truly loved her with all his heart. He never found her body and so did not ever know what had happened to his wife.

What if I die one day and no one ever finds my fossilized remains? Would it then be worth dying in that horrifying manner if no one was there to be impressed by it?

Okay, I'm just kidding. I don't usually kid, but I am being serious here when I say that I may be proud of dying in pain without screaming loud enough for people literally miles away from me to hear it. Or no, upon second thought you may not be able to do that ... If you truly are dying. Excuse me. I'm not a very logically minded person.

There were a few things my mom was as stuck-minded about as not sharing an apple with your horse - like I did - not lying on the grass in public, not eating frying marshmallows or having sugary candies with your hands and that was not acting self-centered about anything, nor stealing, cheating or otherwise deceiving others.

And recently, I happened to have broken that rule. The last one.

Our pantry was stocked with freshly boughten marshmallows, bottles of condensed milk, mangoes, red grapes, pears and figs. And in the fridge, there also stood a professionally baked lemon strawberry cake neatly decorated with sugar white frosting, which I loved. Too much. So I stole it.