He was the first man she had and loved, and she was his first love and only woman. Their story was so beautiful it belonged in a book.
Then everything came crashing down.
When my dad died, a dark shadow fell over the world. I didn’t cry–– I couldn’t––yet my heart drowned in madness. The world I so much loved had let me down and crushed me while teaching me the harshest lesson.
Permanence is an illusion.
It broke me to see my mom’s life shift for the worse. It killed me to see her dying, little by little, every day. She didn’t have enough strength to pull herself back up, and no faith was left in her, and that’s how her life got off the rails.
Her poor choices destroyed her life and impacted us, unknowingly dragging her toward a brutal ending.
It took me a while to get a grip on that reality.
For the most part, I felt guilty because I couldn’t help her mend her heart. Desperation tore through me when I realized she was forever lost to us. That warm, vibrant woman who raised us was no longer with us.
She died inside the same day my father did.
I can only imagine the pain she must’ve felt and the remorse, knowing she’d leave us behind.
I got a taste of that pain. I know how deep it runs and how deadly it is. I know how hard it is to cope with it.
I never blamed her. And I was never angry with her.
The rest came easily.
Once the world started to crumble around me, I became numb and ready to roll with my new life.
I didn’t care much about anything, and I no longer had much to lose, or at least that’s what I thought back then.
When that man touched me for the first time, it didn’t feel as if he was the one who messed me up. I was already screwed up.
It didn’t stir the slightest emotion in me. It didn’t make me feel less than I was.
Besides, I was already gone.
There was no connection between my soul and the external world. It was all shattered.
He didn’t hurt me.
He couldn’t have hurt me since I was no longer there.
I knew I had to help Sara and later Emma, and I did my best to protect them. They were my only family, and I loved them with all my heart, but my feelings were bittersweet because once you have your deep love for someone ripped apart, you never dare to love that way again.
The fear that one day I could lose them too stayed it me, regardless of how irrational that feeling was.
Jacob’s accident did nothing but cement my beliefs. And that was the end.
From then on, I never let myself love again, and after a while, I learned to live without that feeling.
And everything got simpler, really––to sell my body and let the men touch me to satisfy their hunger, get into fights and experience pain so I can feel alive, and last but not least, be ready to leave everything behind at a moment’s notice.
I’ve been living on the fringe, a prisoner of my fucked up life, for some time now.
All alone.
It wasn’t something I could share with anyone else. Not even with Sara. Especially Sara, who had to mend her own heart.
Luckily, she’s past that heartache, and now she has a future to look forward to. She has her education, and she has Emma.