ELEVEN

4. CHOICE

You must know, readers, the deadliest human habit is routine. Cycles that feel unbreakable.

Poor parents teach their children into poverty. Abusive ones teach theirs into abuse. Narcissistic parents into narcissism and, ignorant ones into ignorance.

What you must understand, though, is these cycles are breakable. That down the line of these bloodlines, one child does come across a workshop on wealth management, one chooses not to abuse their loved ones. Someone along the way comes out of the narcissistic mindset and one comes along who chooses to educate themselves.

You must know this, my loves, that had I not done what I did, which you'll soon see, my dad would've been the villain of many more than just eleven life stories.

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And so, here I am, like a Sunday ritual, looking over at the neighboring house through my window, watching quietly as the chaos unfolds. The grandfather flips the glass table, screaming at the couple, and the couple intern shoving and slapping their daughter. The whole scene enfolds, like every other Sunday when the grandparents come to visit them. Is it bad to say that by now, I'm used to this?

However, what I'm not used to, is noticing the auburn long hair and the dark brown eyes of the couple's daughter. She was the umbrella girl. The umbrella girl was my neighbor all these years and I didn't ever once notice. Only heard her screams, watched her cry and watched her patch herself up with bandages after every fight.

This time though, I wanted it to be different.

Don't we all? A voice is just a voice, a scream, only a scream, the cries, just that and at the end, what little they mean. But when we put them all together, put a face and name to the sufferings, as soon as we see them as a human being going through so much pain, then suddenly, we want to protect and we want to help, we want to hear their story and let them know that they will always have someone to talk to about their pain.

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I creaked open my window, though it was still slightly stormy outside. "Hey!" I screamed at my neighbor's window. And repeated it a couple times before she heard me and lifted her gaze off the bandages to look outside.

Seeing me, her face fell. I frowned, but continued either ways. "Hey! Are you okay?"

She furrowed her brows indicating that she couldn't hear me over the storm. I sighed. I quickly grabbed a piece of paper off my nightstand and wrote down the words 'meet me on the road behind both our houses' and pressed it against my window glass. She slowly nodded and I left to put a hoodie on.

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"I'm sorry you had to hear that" her voice was barely heard over the roaring winds. I clasped my hoodie a little tighter and gulped.

"Hey don't say that. Are you okay?" I whispered near her ear. She slowly nodded but silence came over both of them after that.

Suddenly, a car engine revved somewhere near us. I felt the girl grip my hand in fear and horror filled her eyes. "My granddad. That's him. We need to leave." She said, her voice laced with panic.

My mind, suddenly running a mile a minute, could come up with only one place to go. So I grabbed her hand and yanked her off road, running through the trees in the storm. I couldn't see a thing. I should be afraid, right? But the adrenaline in my blood pumped me with more excitement I have felt in a long while.

So here I was, in the middle of the untamed wild, water in my boots and my clothes dripping wet, hand holding hers and laughs ringing in the air along with the lightening. It was getting dark and I was somewhere I shouldn't be with someone I shouldn't see. The sky was crying at our stupid decisions but I could only focus on her laughs and mine.

And that's when I realized that I am most free when I'm being brave. I could be in a dungeon, my hands bleeding from beating the bars, oxygen disappearing from my lungs, and if in that moment I am trying my best, if in that moment I am still beating the bars even with bleeding hands, and if in that moment I am being brave, then nothing will stay the same.

Maybe it will get worse before it gets better, maybe better before it gets worse, but it will not stay the same. And sometimes the braver decisions are also the stupider ones but hey, at least we'll taste a little freedom and at least we'll feel a little alive. At least we will know in the end, that even if nobody else ever tried for us, we tried for ourselves, we put up our best fight and that we were brave no matter how many bruises it gifted us.

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At least I will make it to the old bookstore attic, hiding there with a stranger I've laughed with in the rain and sit their for hours talking about both of our pains. At least I got to spend that Sunday evening drenched but by her side. We promised each other to check up on one another, we let each other know that we were breaking inside and yet, the other never judged. The other simply smiled and said "me too". We held each other till it got too late and dark. She let me in and I let her. We talked for hours about coming back here some other day, exchanged numbers, hugged each other goodbye, wished each other happiness, all because we both made a choice to be brave.

We made a choice to be brave instead of making sense, instead of being right, instead of being safe. We knew that choosing brave over safe, could land us in very difficult places and yet, today it landed us in this attic filled with books and with each other. So we couldn't, for the life of us, think that surviving will ever again feel like a better option than living.

So we stuck to being brave and that choice we made that day, gave us most trouble, and most pain. But it also opened, for us, the only path to freedom.

Though its such a shame, that evening, I never did end up asking her, her name.

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Hey awesome humans! That was chapter 4! Hope you loved reading it. Please like, comment and follow, and surely interact with me on my twitter and other socials. Any visions you have for the cover, if you are an artist, please DM me on twitter, I would absolutely love to hear it. Thank you so much for reading loves, see you in chapter 5.

Shr♡

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