Heaven Collin. That's the name I was given at birth. Collin. Also known as 'HC', which I hated because 'HC' was short for 'high class'. I guess it kind of fit with a mother like mine, I learned it from the best. Somehow I liked Heaven White better, the name that belonged to my father. Which was the only thing I liked about my father.
It was eight thirty, on a Tuesday morning. It wasn't unusual for me to sleep through my alarm these days. It had been several weeks since mom came back from the hospital. Two weeks to be precise. Which meant it had been eleven weeks since they diagnosed her with heart failure and clogged heart arteries. Three out of three heart arteries were clogged after thirty years of smoking and being diabetic. I guess her heart gave up after everything it went through. Ever since the news broke to me, I hid in my room. I didn't have the energy to get up and go to university. It seemed like life lost its meaning after I saw how easy it was to lose it. She survived, don't get me wrong, but I didn't fully get my mother back. She got in as the mother I knew, just sick, and she got out healthy but with another personality.
I looked around my room, realizing how blank it was. I never took the time to make something out of my room, not that it felt like a home either. We had moved to this house just two months before my mother went to the hospital with her problems. I was trapped, trapped in a house, a mansion, that no longer felt like it was where I belonged. It just didn't make sense anymore, none of it did. I sighed deeply, knowing it was another failed day of trying to make something out of it. I was already too late for class so I did not even bother to get ready for it. I just wanted to get my morning coffee and accompany it with a delightful smoke. The only thing I looked forward to. No one understood what it took for me to be here, or what it took to even get out of bed in the morning. All people saw were mistakes, failures, and the negative side of life. But on the other hand, I didn't even bother to explain myself, why you may ask? Because it's impossible to explain to a completely normal person what I went through in my teenage years. Only I knew what happened and how it formed me. Only I knew why I was who I was. The only moment I felt like it was understood how I felt, was when I listened to music. Somehow it felt like the tune, the lyric, just the whole concept overall seemed to fit how I felt and thought. Music was how I coped. "You didn't wake me," I told my stepdad, James Ashley. I was putting my coffee mug a bit too harshly on the counter, making me flinch at the sound it made.
"I did wake you, punk." James said from the couch. I groaned to myself. This was another example of why I didn't even bother to explain myself, everyone knew better. "You just didn't care so I stopped caring too." James went on and I groaned louder for him to hear. I had enough, but I couldn't give up. There were many scars on the inside and out that showed how I coped with myself and the shit I went through. Sometimes my emotions seem to suffocate me and I couldn't seem to figure out how to control them.
"Mom's still in bed?" I asked, annoyed. There wasn't much I had to say to James. Only that we just dealt with each other. We asked what we wanted to know but besides that, there was not really an interaction between us. He had married my mom a couple years back, after the divorce from my dad. I was too old back then to somehow mistake him for my dad but I was too young to understand how life worked. Ever since what happened between my dad and I, nothing could ment the bond I had with any man in my life. Sadly for James, it included my fresh perspective on how I felt towards a guy near me, emotionally and physically. I heard James hum to confirm and I grabbed my coffee and pack of cigarettes to move along towards the backyard. I knew the risk while lightning my smoke, but it felt too good to give up. The nicotine felt like oxygen to my lungs and my brain lost its foggy curtain of sleep. It was early spring, the sun woke up sooner than I did. I looked down, wondering if it all would seem to get better after quite some time.
A year or two ago my addiction of tattoos started. It started with a simple rose but it grew out to a sleeve on my left arm. A subtle way of getting my story out but barely noticeable. I had roses, feathers, even a wolf. No one understood what they meant, only I did and that's what counted for me. They weren't only bits of my story but they also covered my scars, the scars from a time where I really wasn't able to deal with my emotions. A stupid choice I made back then, one I deeply regret but I also understood myself why I did it. I had been to several psychiatrists but none of them clicked or understood. I was always seen as the problematic teenager, maybe because my mother made her problems with me seem worse than my problems with what happened to me. So only I knew the story behind my scars and the tattoos that covered them. "You missed class again, didn't you?" James said when he came outside and stood next to me. I looked away so he couldn't see I rolled my eyes.
YOU ARE READING
Running From You
Teen Fiction"As a woman; I had so much empathy. As a daughter; I felt so much anger." Raising a child is nowhere near easy, but when Heaven grows older alongside her mother, the empathy she feels for her mother slowly turns to anger.
