Chapter One
They say once you have your heart broken, you'll only get stronger.
Well, to whoever the f**k wrote that quote, I've just been to hell and back and I'm still f*****g miserable.
I've come to the bitter conclusion that love, the kind that sweeps you off your feet and makes you forget everything else that's wrong in the world- that love only exists in fairy tales. Everything else you hear from your parents, or from cheesy romance movies in your young teenage years while you're sitting in the arms of some random jock who probably has his eyes on another girl, is wrong.
True love doesn't exist. It isn't real. But what is real is having a hell lot of trust in someone only for him to crush your hopes and toss them in the trash like you never mattered.
It's a weakness. It could be used as a weapon against you and utterly destroy you if someone wanted to. It makes you vulnerable and helpless.
Pain is real. Without pain, you would never even know if you were alive. Pain brings you back to reality and snaps you out of that fairy tale life you were living in as a teenager.
Pain knocked on my door at a young age when I woke up several times a night to hear the helpless cries of my mother as she asked my father, no, begged him to stop his drunken assault against her. I could hear the impacts of the blows delivered and the wet gushing as blood escaped her flesh.
I remember walking in with a firm vow to stop him, my little fists balled up at my side and tears running down my cheeks. I can't even begin to express how much horror ran through my face as I stared in shock at the feeble body in front of me. My mother, the strongest woman I had ever known, was writhing on the floor in pain, clutching her stomach with dried tears marring her face. And my father, the same who had made waffles for me every day before school, towered over her, his knuckles glistening with blood as he admired his work.
And then his eyes found me. His young, five-year-old daughter.
Can you imagine how utterly f****d up a man must be to continue to assault his wife even after acknowledging that his toddler was now watching him in fear? Or maybe he was too drunk to notice.
My mother didn't deserve anything that he inflicted upon her. And me? I didn't deserve to be born. They had Matt, my older brother and only planned on having one child, but after some time, my father changed. He grew violent and developed a cliche alcohol addiction.
It's safe to say that my birth was the result of an accident. Not an accident, but because my father couldn't take 'no' for an answer. Even as an accident, my mother still raised me with immense love and affection. As I grew up, I tried many times to make her leave him. But, she was trapped.
My mother was a caged bird with clipped wings. She could escape whenever she desired, but there was no guarantee that she would actually survive if she left. But not me and Matt. As soon as Matt reached 18, he ran and was never heard from again.
A few years after, I followed suit and went off to college away from home. I felt bad about leaving my mother in that hellhole, but a year after I left, I received a single phone call from that bastard I was ashamed to call my father. The years of abuse had finally caught up with her aged body and she had passed away.
From that point, pain had been knocking on my door over and over. Disappointment greeted me around every corner of my path. There have been countless days where I have just felt nothing. I felt dead inside, numb to the world around me.
As I pulled my lighter out to light to cigarette I was holding between my teeth, I examined my reflection closely on the mirror before me. Sunken eyes, check. Dark, brittle hair, check. Pale, lifeless skin, check. I looked like a hollow corpse. f**k, even corpses had more life than me.
I wasn't always like this, though. There was a time in my life when my eyes were full of light, when I had started enjoying the little things in life. I had even started to believe in love and thought that it was possible for me to find my prince. But, as it turns out, Prince f*****g Charming was more f****d up in ways that I could ever have imagined.
I made all the stupid choices girls in those cheesy romance movies did, and hell do I regret every moment of it because life- life isn't a romance movie. It's real. And its messed up.
And it all started when my dear old brother decided to pay me a visit after disappearing off the face of the earth for over four years.
