marble and quicksand - a poem collection.

places

The author has changed the names in this story to protect the privacy of everyone involved.

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The airport is not that busy today. I guess I should be glad for that, because I don't know if I could handle so many people on my own, especially not today. My shoulder is sore from pulling my suitcase around, and I absently start stretching my arm a little. I look out of the huge glass window next to me, and see a place that I have never seen before. The sun is blazing down on a row of palm trees, and from the airport I can see a big freeway. "Traffic is horrible here", I think to myself, and start to tremble. I was waiting for this to happen, but even though I was trying to prepare mentally, nothing could have prepared me for this feeling of loneliness. I really left my home, and went to look for a better place, a better life.

I think back to when it all started, years and years ago. It started in a little 3-room apartment, in the home of a family called the Smiths, my family. We weren't rich by any means, but we were happy. I was the typical single child, until my parents decided that they didn't want me to be a single child, and I went through the typical worries of not being the center of their universe anymore, and my parents reassured me that that wasn't going to happen, and then there were two little Smiths, Mark Anthony and Erica Lee, and of course I ended up loving my little brother to death, like every typical former single child. In my little world, the four of us were perfect, and the biggest hero in my life was my father. He always challenged me to do better, because he knew I could. He supported me when I was feeling down, and I could always count on him to be there for me. At least most of the time.

Because then there were the bad days, the days where I hid in my bed because my father was yelling at my mother in the kitchen. The days where I would be scared to go home because I hadn't cleaned my room the day before and he had already told me that there would be consequences after school. He always asked me what I thought I deserved as a punishment, and I had to think of something. If what I told him I thought it should be was too mild, he would tell me that I was trying to escape punishment, even though he had been so nice to grant me the right to choose one that was appropriate myself. I always ended up being way too harsh to myself in the end, just to avoid the conflict.

The conflicts with my dad were horrible. I had nightmares about them, and even when he was happy, I felt like I had to tread carefully around him. Do not wake the sleeping dragon, right? Once we got into a fight, my dad would become the coldest man in the world. I imagined the cold seeping into the floor, into the walls around me, slowly turning the comfy living room into a prison of ice. He didn't yell at me unless it got very bad, but he always made me feel like the most unloved person in the world, even without raising his voice. Sometimes, he did yell though. One time, he walked into my room, shouting, holding two big garbage bags. My brother and I were sharing a room at the time, and I hadn't cleaned up my half of the room and instead had fallen asleep because my day at school had been tiring and I hadn't slept well the night before. My father shook me until I was awake, then forced me to put all of my toys that were laying on the floor into the garbage bags. I was crying, and told him I would clean up, but he wasn't having it. After I was done, he threw all the toys away and didn't speak to me until dinner, where he behaved normally and pretended it had never happened.

I was seven years old at the time.

The hot and dusty desert air greets me as I step out of the airport doors. I look around and try to find the person that is supposed to pick me up, until I finally spot a familiar face. "Hi, sweetheart! How was the flight? I am so happy to see you!", my aunt says while hugging me ferociously. I hug her back, overwhelmed by the amount of talking, and mostly just nod and smile while she keeps chatting about this and that. I will come to learn that I will do that a lot. I am not new to the game of faking things. It was always a big part of my life, trying to mask the fact that I was not okay. I began faking my smiles in fourth grade, which was also the first time I got catfished.