Entangled in Darkness

  Chapter 6

  Life was falling apart beneath me, on top of me, all around me. The day had become much more than a wreck. I had tried to kill myself that evening. I had taken a sharp blade to my wrist and drew blood. There was nothing much worse than that, I thought as I lay there in my bed, my covers hiding me from the world but not from the pain inside of me.

  As I lay there, I could feel the dampness on my pillow from the tears that had been falling for what felt like hours. I didn’t know what time it was but I knew it was night from the lack of light seeping through my covers. The house was quiet. I figured everyone had gone to bed, or were at least trying to be quiet so they wouldn’t wake me. But I wasn’t sleeping. I hadn’t slept at all. There was too much going on inside of my head to sleep. All I could see was the image of blood pooling in my palm. I could only feel pain – physical and mental. There was such anguish inside of me. Sadness. Guilt. Broken dreams of what my life was supposed to have become that fall.

  My arm was so sore. The pain was intense and throbbing. I could feel it radiating throughout my entire arm. I had to keep my hand still. Just tensing it even a little made the pain sharper and jabbing. I had it elevated on a pillow as I lay slightly towards my side so that I was facing the wall.

  I kept my eyes open to keep out the images of blood flashing through my mind, but I couldn’t drown out the sound I was hearing. I could hear a clock ticking as time moved slowly. I didn’t know where it was coming from but it was numbing. I seemed to fall into the rhythm of the ticking as I lay there trying to sleep. I could feel the ticking as if my body were in sync with it, as if my heart were beating alongside it, blood pulsing through my arteries at the same rate. It wasn’t comforting at all as one might think. It numbed me into a somber state as I drowned in the sound. It was all around me. Tick... tick... tick... I just lay there listening.

  Suddenly I heard a grumble. I almost jumped up but as soon as I went to move, I felt the sharp sting of my wrist and lay back. I took my good hand and lifted the covers off my face, first wiping away any tears, and looked over to see my father sitting there in the dark. I could see it was him from the moonlight shining through the open curtains. He seemed to be staring at the moon as he sat there in the same uncomfortable chair my sister had been sitting in earlier.

  I slowed my breaths to keep quiet as I watched his face bathing in the moonlight. He swallowed and then looked at me. His eyes drew open slightly as he noticed I was awake. He looked at the ground for a moment, letting out a breath, and then looked up at me. His face tensed as if he were in pain.

  "Go back to sleep," he said in a hushed voice.

  "I wasn’t sleeping. I can’t sleep," I whispered, not wanting to wake up the rest of the house as I noticed my clock read 2:23am.

  "Wait there," my father said and then got up and left. I sat there waiting for him as my stomach fluttered. I didn’t know what he had gone to do. The sane part of me knew it was nothing bad, but the rest of me wondered what horrible thing could be awaiting me. Perhaps there would be a lecture. Maybe he would give me a good harsh talking to about what I had done. But what had he gone to do?

  He re-emerged into the room and walked straight towards me with his hand held out but fisted.

  "Put out your hand," he said.

  I looked at him with worried but curious eyes and did what he said, sitting up and carefully moving my aching arm onto my lap. I held out my good hand and he dropped a little pill into my hand. I immediately put the pill on my nightstand and turned on the dim lamp to look at it. It was small and blue in an oblong shape. I looked back at him curiously.

  "What is it?" I asked. My eyes must have shown the shock I felt inside.

  "A sleeping pill. Just take it and get some sleep," he insisted.

  "Where did you get it?" I looked at him with curious wide-eyes.

  "From our doctor. Just take it. It’s harmless. I wouldn’t give it to you if it wasn’t," he said in a stern but hushed voice.

  I nodded and put the pill in my mouth and tried to swallow it dry but it didn’t make it past the back of my throat. There was a horrible medicinal taste as it started to disintegrate against my spit. I quickly grabbed the glass of water on my night stand that I hadn’t even noticed until now. Finally the pill was down and I gulped the entire glass before sticking out my tongue in disgust.

  "Why does it taste so bad?" He rolled his eyes at me, not even portraying a hint of a smile.

  My father moved back to the chair and sat down. He looked at me and saw that I was still sitting there. He motioned me to lie down. I swung my legs back in bed and lay down carefully, putting my sore arm back on the pillow it had been elevated on. I swallowed hard at the pain from moving it. I wanted to

  cry from the pain but I couldn’t with him there. I got comfortable and pulled the covers back over my head.

  After a moment, I realized I wasn’t alone. My father was still sitting there. I knew he was before but I didn’t think about it until I had gone to close my eyes and try and sleep. It felt awkward having someone sitting there watching you sleep. It was even worse knowing that it was because he was afraid I would hurt myself again. I had no desire to though. After attempting it the first time, I couldn’t bear the thought of doing it again. Not after having parents frantically hovering over me to bandage my arm, and having my little sister sit there feeling hurt and abandoned. Even as I was doing it, I realized it wasn’t what I wanted. But it was the first time I really had felt anything other than sadness and numbness. It was terror mixed in with regret and a desire to not die. For the first time, I realized I didn’t want to die. And so I lay there regretful and terrorized by the thought of what could have happened, how it could have all been over.

  I sighed and pulled the covers off my head.

  "Dad?" I said in a quiet voice as I looked at him with longing eyes.

  "Yes?"

  "I’m sorry."

  Suddenly a rush came over me and tears began to fall heavily down my face. I sobbed violently into my good hand as I lay the other painfully in my lap.

  "I’m sorry, I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to. I’ll never do it again," I pleaded with him, and with myself.

  "You should sleep, Annalyn. It will be a lot better if you just sleep this off," he said calmly, though I could see pain written on his face. He was trying to hide it, trying to be strong and cold, but I knew he was in anguish just like me.

  "I don’t think I can sleep, Dad," I cried.

  "Just lie down and let the pill work." His voice was calm but sorrow-filled. I could hear a little crackle in it. He didn’t want to cry. He couldn’t cry in front of me, just like I couldn’t cry in front of him. And I knew that. I felt so bad to be putting him in so much pain, but a part of me was selfishly glad that he must actually care about me.

  "Okay," I sniffled as I took a tissue and wiped my nose.

  I looked at him one last time and his eyes dropped to the floor. I lay back down, my arm throbbing, and cried myself to sleep quietly.

  My head jarred with pain as I sat at the breakfast nook next to my parents and sisters. Lydia had come to join us for brunch at the house that Sunday morning. Mom cooked raspberry pancakes smothered with maple syrup, scrambled eggs, bacon and hash browns. My sisters and I were squeezed into the green and burgundy floral window seat to which the table was pulled up to. My parents sat across from us in normal chairs. We had done this for years but when we were small it never felt quite as squishy as it did in that moment.

  I stared at my food, my eyes feeling glossed over. I wasn’t really looking at my plate, I was just looking down. I couldn’t stand looking at anyone in my family. They were all so cheery-looking. I could feel it was fake though. There was a sort of intangible tension hovering over the table like thunder brewing in some dark clouds. They were all chatting about their meaningless events of their meaningless week as I sat there silent. Mom was describing a new sweater she was knitting for her knitting course.
I couldn’t bear to listen to such trivial chatter while they all pretended there was nothing wrong and nothing had happened. It was numbing my ears listening to them.

  My head hurt so bad, I just wanted to get up and take a small handful of Tylenol. My thoughts were swimming with notions of my own mortality and blood. I could see my arm flowing with that crimson red squirting out of it. It didn’t matter that I had not cut myself deep enough to hit an artery. My mind still insisted on vividly showing me what it would have looked like if I had. My room was covered in bright blood that had sprayed all over it. It looked more like someone had been shot in the head or the heart than just a slit wrist. My head didn’t care. It just wanted to horrify me with ‘What Ifs.’ I could have died. That was the point and yet it seemed so head-aching, heart-wrenching and frightening. I didn’t want to die. I was now terrified I might somehow. Everything felt so grim.

  I thought about all the ways I could die just sitting there. What if the wind that morning picked up a little and knocked over a tree that would come crashing down on top of our breakfast nook? Or perhaps there would be an earthquake that would shatter the glass behind my head and a shard would go flying into the back of my neck. Maybe a grizzly bear would happen to come upon our yard after smelling the yummy breakfast and force its way into our house. Of course, it would realize the breakfast isn’t nearly as good as eating five fleshy fatty humans.

  I cringed. My heart was racing. I felt dizzy. My forehead felt like it was slick with sweat. I needed to lie down but I couldn’t because then they would know something was wrong. I couldn’t let them know. I was fine. They had to think I was fine. It didn’t matter how much my wrist ached or the fact that a trickle of blood had seeped through the gauze overnight leaving a little spotted line of dried blood showing through the bright white. It sickened me to look at the blood. My stomach felt queasy from it and from the pain for which I didn’t have anything more than Tylenol and aspirin. I couldn’t eat so I just stared at my plate of food, stirring it up and hoping that I didn’t throw up from the intense stress, fear, and sight of awful blood both in my mind and on my wrist. I was sick, inside and out.

  There was so much tension inside of me that I almost stopped feeling the tension at the table until my sister spoke up. I hadn’t been listening but her words suddenly sprung out of the conversation.

  "And what about Annalyn?" Lydia asked, looking around the table with her snide look.

  "What about me?" I asked waking up from a daze. The room was spinning slightly as I tried to look coherent.

  "I was just wondering about how you were doing in school? I mean we’re talking all about how I’m doing. I just thought maybe it would be nice if we included the new university student in the conversation. I’m sure everyone is dying to hear how great university has been for you. Certainly it was great when I started. I’ve been so successful, I just know you will be too. So tell us all about it." She mocked me as she gave me a head slanted look of curiosity.

  "You bitch." I let my eyes tear into her as I looked at her with my piercing stare.

  "Annalyn, I was just trying to be nice. Why can’t you ever be the good sister?" She looked at Janey and put her arm around her. "Like Janey here?"

  "Get off me, bitch!" Janey yelled pushing her away.

  "Hey! Watch your language," my father warned Janey. His eyes were starting to look angry and agitated.

  "Sorry," Janey replied meekly as she swallowed and looked down at her plate.

  She moved her fork around for a moment and then took in a bite as if she were dropping out of the conversation. I couldn’t blame her for not wanting to make dad angry at her. She had six more years of his terror. I would be back to my apartment in a day or two.

  "I just don’t understand why we are all trying to hide what happened. I mean, why did you even invite me over for brunch? So I could stare at the freak show over there with a bloody wrist and smile and look pretty, pretending that we are one big happy family? Is that what the point of this was? Because I don’t understand how this is working. There’s no happy family here. No matter how big of a fake smile mom forces on her face, and no matter how much love she cooks into breakfast, we are not a happy family—"

  "Stop it!" Mom cried, interrupting Lydia’s speech.

  Lydia looked shocked as mom spoke up. Then she shook her head. "Am I the only one who speaks the truth around here?"

  Her eyes were glaring at all of us as we sat there silently. Dad was brimming with anger. I braced myself waiting for him to explode.

  "Seriously? No one has anything to say about how Annalyn sliced up her wrist yesterday? I mean were you trying to kill yourself?" she asked, turning to me. "Why the hell would you even consider that. I mean don’t you care about us?"

  "Leave!" a loud roar came. I looked at my father with his red face and popping veins at his temples. He stood up and pointed towards the door as he grabbed onto Lydia’s arm and dragged her off her seat.

  "Let go of me!" she yelled, pushing him out of the way. She then ran out of the house wailing in a high-pitched cry, screaming ‘I hate you’ a couple times. I heard a door slam a second later.

  "Eat your food," Dad said in a stern voice as he sat back down and started shoveling in his pancakes.

  His face was red, his veins still popping. Then he dripped some of the red raspberry juice from the pancakes on his light blue sweater that mom had knit him last Christmas. I could feel everyone’s heart stop in that moment. I held my breath as I quivered inside. Suddenly he started screaming out profanities. He yelled them out three or four times before he got up and grabbed a cloth.

  "No no. Don’t rub it in further. You’ve got to blot!" my mom said in a panic, tears in her eyes.

  "I can do it!" he screamed.

  "Neil, you’re gonna..." she started to cry. Soon she was sobbing hard. I grabbed a napkin and ran it up to her so she could wipe away the tears. She nodded in thanks.

  "Sit down and eat!" my father roared at me, shifting his eyes between me and Janey. I did exactly what he said. I shoveled in my food. I didn’t care if I made a mess. I didn’t care if I wasn’t hungry, if I felt nauseous and just wanted to run upstairs and hide under those inviting covers. I ate because I was terrified. I just shoved the food into my mouth. Janey did the same, tears streaming down her face as she ate.

  After a moment of crying, my mom came and sat back down and started to eat. She didn’t look at us. She just ate slowly and solemnly, forcing herself to breath evenly without sobbing. Every few breathes she would let out a little sob though.

  My dad stood at the island counter blotting his sweater with a gruesome look on his face. After a moment, he sighed and tossed the wet raspberry stained rag across the kitchen to the sink. He sat back down, his face starting to return to normal colour and his veins going back into hiding, and ate his food. No one spoke at all. It was a deathly silence. I felt it cutting through me. I just kept eating with my good arm, my other one aching in my lap, until my plate was empty and then I excused myself to go upstairs. My heart was pounding in my chest as I walked quickly up the stairs. I jumped in bed the minute I got there and covered up myself with the blankets, letting the darkness invade my eyes once again.

  I could hear the door to my bedroom creak open. I was about to lift the covers off my head when I heard a loud sigh and the door shutting again. I looked up and whoever it was had left. I got out of bed and opened the door to see Janey walking back into her room. I followed her until I found myself standing at her door.

  "Was that you in my room?" I asked her curiously.

  "I was seeing if you were awake. I didn’t mean to wake you. I’m sorry," she said solemnly.

  "What’s wrong?" I asked her, forgetting about my own misery for hers.

  "Nothing. I’m just sorry is all." She shrugged and sat down at her laptop. It started playing some R&B music didn’t recognize that jarred my ears. I sat down on her bed.

  "Are you mad at me?" I a
sked her, looking at her with unsure eyes.

  "No."

  She kept her eyes on the computer screen. I could see her sending instant messages to some of her friends online.

  "You are mad. You are completely ignoring me at this moment. I used to be the most important person in your life and now these people you are instant messaging are more important than talking to me. Yes, you are definitely mad at me." I explained to her in a calm voice.

  She didn’t look at me. Her eyes seemed preoccupied by whatever was on the screen. I decided to give her a few minutes to do whatever it was she was doing online. Meanwhile, I looked around her room. The unicorn wallpaper was still there.

  "So when is the death sentence for the unicorns?" I asked her.

  "What?" she snapped at me.

  "Isn’t mom gonna let you have a room makeover at some point. I mean you’re thirteen in a couple months."

  "What wallpaper I have is none of your business. I don’t need you going through my room and criticizing everything about it." She turned her piercing eyes back to the computer screen. I could see the corner of her frown relaxing as she returned to her instant messaging.

  "I wasn’t criticizing. I think your room is cute." I smiled and looked around. I could see her as a little four year old in a princess costume running around and counting the unicorns on the wall.

  "I’m not cute." She said in a slow and deliberate voice, not even turning her head from the computer screen.

  "And that’s exactly why I am wondering when you are gonna get rid of the unicorn wallpaper."

  "Will you stop it with the stupid wallpaper!" She snapped her head around and stared me dead in the eye. It felt like a dagger jabbing into my eye.

  "Sorry," I said. I looked down at the red stained gauze on my throbbing arm and felt shame pervade me.

  "What do you want from me?" she asked me in a rushed tone.

  "Why did you even come to my room if you obviously didn’t want to see me?" I stared at her waiting for an answer as she stood there blank faced before me. "Well?" I asked again.

  "I just wanted to see if you were okay. If you were alive and breathing. I was checking on you, okay." She looked down and hid her eyes from me.

  "So you want me to be alive and yet the minute I walk into your room, you want nothing to do with me. How does work?" I stared at her wide-eyed with raised eye brows.

  "Leave me alone," she blurted out and turned back to her computer.

  "That’s not fair. You know I’m going through some stuff right now—"

  "We are all going through stuff right now, Annalyn! Don’t you think that what you did affects the rest of us? Because it does. It really does. So just go back to bed and hide under the covers and pretend that what you did wasn’t hurtful and ignorant. Go back to your own little world." "I’m sorry," I said in a whisper as I gazed into my lap.

  "Maybe you care now, but obviously when it gets bad, you don’t care. Did you think about me at all when you were about to kill yourself and leave me alone forever? Because you almost did it. What about me? What about me? Tell me!" she said, her voice growing louder to a scream.

  "Stop! I’m sorry." I started to cry, avoiding her gaze.

  "What about me!" she screamed out again.

  "I love you. What I did doesn’t change that." Tears began crawling down my cheeks.

  "Well obviously you didn’t love me enough in that moment. You chose death over me. You chose death over me!" she cried.

  "No, I didn’t! You were mad at me. I couldn’t stand it. And then dad came and screamed at me for making you cry. I couldn’t handle what I had done. I was a burden. I was bringing you down and making Dad angry and it was just all out of control. I was hurting so much inside. I just had to make it stop. It was like I was in a trance when I went into Mom’s sewing stuff and took out the rotary cutter. I wasn’t thinking. I was a robot. The moment I did it, I knew it was a mistake. That’s why I stopped. I could have kept going. I could have made it so deep I would’ve had to go to the hospital. I didn’t. I stopped! "I’m sorry. There isn’t anything else I can do but be sorry and you’ll never understand how absolutely sorry I am. I wasn’t abandoning you. In that moment... there was no one else in the moment," I said shaking my head with tears in my eyes, "It was just me and a bunch of grey haze. I wanted to make all that go away. I wasn’t capable of thinking about you or anything else in that moment. I couldn’t see past all the grey.

  "But the thing is, that changed things. I feel different now. I realize how much I screwed up. I know now that I don’t want to die. I still feel crappy and depressed, but I don’t want to die. I want to live. This is the first time I actually feel like I want that. The first time in a long time. I don’t need you to understand. I don’t expect you to. I just want you to know that I love you and I never wanted to hurt you. I’m sorry. You have to know how sorry I am. All I can offer you is my sincere apology." I looked at her with a deep sincerity but she shied away from my eyes. I couldn’t tell if I was getting through to her or not. She just stood there crying.

  "I have homework," she said finally. She turned around and grabbed the Science 7 textbook off her desk and threw it hard onto the bed. She then grabbed a binder and hurled it over, just missing my sore arm. Finally, she took out a pen and chucked it over. I ducked before it came close to me.

  "Well, what are you still doing here?" she asked me with fury in her eyes.

  "Waiting for you to kill me with your school supplies, obviously." I said. She just looked at me, her irritated eyes staring a hole through my whole body.

  "Okay, I’ll go." I said in defeat and walked out of the room.

  I heard the slamming of her door behind me. I turned around and stood there for a moment to look at the stuff on her door. I walked up to it and saw the sign that said ‘Janey’ on it. It was made of pink construction paper with gold glitter on it and some silver and gold stars stuck all over it. On the edge was part of a pink feather boa. I remembered her making that when she was eight. She loved doing crafts when she was a kid. There used to be tons of artwork and crafts done by her throughout our house. Most of it had been put away carefully by our mom into keepsake boxes. I assumed there was tons of crappy artwork by me in those boxes too, but I never bothered to look through it.

  I stood there and smiled as I looked at her door. After a few minutes, I walked back to my room and headed straight for a wooden chest at the end of my bed. It was stained a medium brown and had a collage of pictures of me as a kid done in decoupage on the lid. There were pictures of me as a princess, as a frog on Halloween one year, and as a purple fairy. Some pictures were of me playing house in one of those plastic Fisher-Price kitchen play sets. There was one of me having tea with dad. My favourite one was of me at ten years old pushing little Janey in the swing out back. I remember just after that picture was taken she had fallen off the swing and scraped up her knee. She cried a lot for the first five minutes and then got back on the swing and told me to push her higher. Thinking of that made me smile.

  I opened up the chest to find trinkets and mementoes of my childhood neatly organized from top to bottom. The drawings and paintings were all in one folder. Then there were the clay figurines wrapped in bubble wrap in a shoe box on the other side. There were some toys in other shoe boxes. Everything was stacked up in an orderly fashion.

  I hadn’t opened the boxes in a few years. There was never a reason to. At least, I never felt a reason to dig into my past before. It felt like a black box that hid all the special things of my childhood—things that were bittersweet to me now. Thinking of them reminded me of how things changed as I was a teenager, how I had lost my childhood naivety and innocence. I would always feel so emotional when I opened that box, so sad and longing for those days, that I never opened it. But in that moment, I needed to. There was something I needed to find.

  I pulled out a few shoe boxes and some folders with my good hand and finally I found it. It was a sign
that used to be hung on my bedroom door with my name on it. It was a full sheet of eight by eleven and a half construction paper that had my name on it in felt pen in various colours for each letter. The background was violet. All over it was rainbow glitter. Some of the glitter fell off it and landed on my carpet as I looked at it. There were also stickers of Care Bears, My Little Ponies, unicorns, and butterflies all over it. Some were starting to peel off. I ran my finger against them to try and stick them back on but the edges were too curled. I had made this when I was seven and had hung it on my door proudly until I was a young teenager. Then it got shoved into the box and hidden away for half a decade.

  As I looked at it, my eyes felt glossed over with tears and I thought of that happy kid that knew nothing of depression and the darkness of the world. The child that never realized there was something wrong with her family—that never thought anything was wrong with life at all. I wanted to be her again. Suddenly a rush of fluttering emotions came over me. I felt flushed as my face grew warm and my heart beat quickly. I tossed the sign back in the chest and shut the lid, covering it back up with the navy blue blanket that had been neatly folded on top of it. I got in bed without letting any thoughts come into my mind and covered myself up with the comforter. I needed to hide from the world, from my childhood and all those smiling pictures of myself. They were too painful to look at. She—me—was so happy. She had no reason to be guilty. She wasn’t a burden to anyone. She was joy and goodness and all the things I no longer was. I couldn’t see her and so I hid from her, the world, and let the darkness wash over me.

  I kicked my legs back and forth again with frustration as I lay in bed. I couldn’t stop moving. I was so restless and tense. The only part of me I kept still was my aching blood stained and gauzed up arm that was in too much pain to move. I had been tossing and turning relentlessly for the last few hours. I looked at the clock again to see 2:03am — only eight minutes later than when I last looked. I turned back over again to face the wall and started shaking my feet back and forth rhythmically and fast. Soon they were almost vibrating as they shook. I couldn’t let them stop because I couldn’t be still. Whenever I was completely still, I felt like I would explode with tension. I had to move. I didn’t know why. I guess with everything that had happened since yesterday, I was just really tense.

  My mind wasn’t still either. It was like I could hear the angry voices of my family yelling at me inside my head. My thoughts had become so vivid, their voices so intense and realistic, that it sounded like they were really inside my head. They just kept yelling at me over and over again. Sometimes all at once, other times they were yelling one at a time. It was the same thing over and over again.

  "Bitch! Freak!" Lydia was yelling at me. "You’re a freak. Look at the freak sitting across the table from me. Let’s all look at the disgusting freak show!"

  I cringed as I listened to her. ‘Freak’ seemed to keep reverberating in the background while the others started to yell. My heart beat hard against the yelling like a drum solo. I could feel it beating against my chest.

  "You were going to abandon me! You didn’t care about me enough to live. I want my sister back!" I could hear Janey again. I tried to hold the tears back.

  "I want my sister back! I want my sister back!" she screamed at me. I started to hum little kid songs to drown out my head. On Top of Spaghetti. It was the first song that came to mind. I used to sing it all the time as a kid. It was comforting. So I hummed it louder and louder until the room was full of a horrible humming. I hummed through clenched teeth at first but soon I found myself singing the words quietly to myself in a slightly squeaky sounding voice as I really couldn’t sing.

  "On top of spaghetti..."

  "You bitch!" Lydia interrupted me. I ignored her and kept singing. "All covered in cheese. I lost my poor meatball—" my voice quivered.

  "You freak!" Ignore her, I thought to myself.

  "I lost my poor meatball when somebody sneezed." My voice cracked a little with fear. "It rolled..." I choked on my words as I began to cry. "It rolled off of the table."

  "You don’t care about me at all. You were gonna abandon me," I could hear Janey starting her turn to yell in my mind.

  "And onto the floor," I pushed forward.

  "How dare you!" Janey screamed.

  "An...And... then my poor meat—" I sniffled, "meatball rolled out of the door."

  "You should roll out the door," Lydia’s voice taunted.

  I sobbed quietly as I tried to keep singing. "It...it rolled down to the garden."

  "Why would you do this to me?" I could hear Janey crying. "You abandoned me!" she screamed.

  "No I didn’t!" I yelled out impulsively. "Just sing the song," I told myself quietly. "And under a bush and then my poor meatball was nothing but mush," I rushed through the words. "The mush was as tasty, as tasty could be, and then the next summer it grew into a tree." Quicker I sang, managing to remember all the words to the song that had been my favourite as a child.

  "You’re nothing but a pathetic disappointment," my father’s voice cut in loudly with a piercing tone.

  "No... no no no... Just sing," I told myself as I cried. "The tree was all covered, all covered with moss, and on it grew meatballs, all covered with sauce." I was singing louder than before as I pushed the words past my quivering lips. My stomach was fluttering inside and my heart was beating harsh in my chest.

  "You bitch!" they all yelled. "You burden!" Tears streamed down my face.

  "So if you have spaghetti," I cried, "all covered with cheese hold onto your meatball ‘cause" I choked on my sobs,” because someone might sneeze." I broke down and curled up into a ball on my bed and shook violently with crying.

  "Pathetic!" he yelled.

  "You abandoned me! You don’t love me!" Janey screamed.

  "Neil help! Neil help, she’s bleeding!" my mom cried out. "She’s bleeding, she’s going to die, she’s going to go to hell! Neil help!" I cried harder.

  "Think of a song," I told myself with intense irritation. "Think!" I was yelling at myself.

  "Michael row the boat ashore. Michael row the boat ashore. Michael row the boat ashore. Ashore. Ashore. Damnit! Ashore!" I couldn’t take it anymore. The singing wouldn’t make their hatred of me go away. It wasn’t quieting my head at all. "Go away, please, just go away," I cried to myself. "Why are you doing this to me?" I asked myself.

  My mind had never been so destructive and powerful before. They didn’t even sound like they were coming from my mind, but they must because no one was in my room. I felt terrified nonetheless. I couldn’t see anything but the moon shining through my curtains. But there was no silence—only them yelling over and over again. I needed to make them stop but I didn’t know how, and what was worse was I couldn’t stop moving. I just kept tossing and turning and kicking my legs back and forth in bed. My arm hurt sharply every time I turned over, but I couldn’t help it anymore. I couldn’t be still.

  I knew at that point that I needed to get out of there. I got up and looked out the window. For some reason it looked inviting. I felt like I had been trapped in that house for two days. Maybe getting out with some fresh air would be helpful. So I quickly changed into some grey sweatpants and a navy blue hoodie. I dug through the bag my mom had packed for me and hoped there were runners. I pulled everything out furiously as I looked for them. When I found them, I put them on right away and crept down the stairs quietly and out the front door. I never thought to bring keys or lock the door. I just left.