Sinner's Place {h.s}

sixty.

I paced back and forth on the back porch of our home while my nails chipped away at the polish on my fingers. Stress wasn't a good enough word to describe the weight on my shoulders. If I didn't know any better, I'd start to think that I'd be cemented to the hard floors and not be able to move under the collapse.

My right hand had a firm grip on the cell phone in my hand while I awaited a call that I wasn't even sure was going to come. It was a call that I got often on days that my mum had her episodes, really just a complimentary call to let me know she was okay.

I hated to admit that her mind was worsening, envisioning that my dead father was in the room with us, and that he was there to take her. When she started to talk about him being in the room, I knew that escorting Anna out of the room was the best option.

I didn't want her to see my mum go through an episode.

For me, it's terrifying. The first time I'd experienced it after putting her in the home, I walked out in tears. I felt like a kid; scared and confused. I didn't know what was happening to my mum.

Now, I realize it's the outbursts that usually come with her conditions.

I try to calm her down each time it happens, but I fail a hundred percent of the time. I just hoped that one day it could become at least one percent.

Each time I visit her, I feel my heart chip away, just to return home to Anna who will either piece it together or chip further away at my fragile still-beating heart.

It had been sometime that I fell to my knees and prayed so deeply that it brought me to tears. When me and Anna got home after our fight, she fell asleep that night with her arms wrapped around me. I stayed up and stared at the ceiling until she eventually fell into deep sleeep and rolled away from me.

It wasn't immediately on my mind, but God was it on my heart, heavy and almost a compulsion to leave the bed to pray.

There are not many things I pray about anymore.

But I found myself on my knees on the porch, the porch light illuminating my stature while I stared up at the sky. The night was cold and it was raining—it had been raining a lot this past week.

When I closed my eyes and started to pray, I even wondered if I believed in Him anymore. Was He going to do anything for me? Or were my hopeless prayers something that God only scoffed and turned a blind eye to?

At the thought, the deepest hopeless feeling of not having control of a situation, I, for once in my life, begged Him to make things easier for me. These choices in my life were getting harder and I was losing the strength to make those decisions that weren't ideal.

Blacking out, when I came back to consciousness, I peeled my eyes open to find that my knees were red and angry against the porch that rubbed and irritated them. My vision was blurred by the angry thought that maybe God couldn't save me, or really anyone.