Slamming the door behind me I ran through the pouring rain to my dad’s truck. It would forever be my dad’s truck; I would never call it mine.

8 years prior my father had died from bone cancer. It was the worst things you could experience really, to see someone you love slowly disintegrate before your very eyes. All through my life my father had been my hero, my rock if you will. He’d served eight years in the U.S. Navy and had received many medals, but quit all of that when my mother had me. He swore that the only reason that the sun was shining was because my smile allowed it to.

When he’d died it had killed me on the inside. I didn’t eat for weeks; I wouldn’t talk to anybody especially my mother.

My mother, in my eyes, was a freeloading whore who didn’t deserve my father. She’d always bled him dry with his money, treated him badly, and cheated on him once or twice. But he never left her. I blamed myself for his suffering because, in my heart, I knew he was doing it for me. He himself had come from a loveless family, a separated family where he felt neglected and uncared about. That was the reason he’d gone into the Navy. He’d used it as an outlet, a channel for his anger. A place for him to be free. He hadn’t wanted a family like his for me.

More than once I’d told him it was ok, that he didn’t need to stay here. I told him to leave, to never come back. But being the stubborn man that he was he refused and that was the end of the story.

When he’d died he’d left everything to us, mainly to me. I actually inherited almost all of his money and valuable belongings, his private things that he didn’t want anyone to see. He’d always kept a journal from the time that he was a little boy up until his death. It had his every thought and every feeling in it. His pain, his love, his angst, his sorrow.

Of course, since at the time I was only 13 years old I was still under the custody of my mother. Somehow she’d swayed the judge to hand over the money and other belongings to herself. I have many theories as to how this happened, and none of them are good. However, the one item she’d wanted the most for some odd reason was his journal. Of course I would never let her have that. Everything else that she had taken that had been rightfully mine she could have, but the journal was the one thing I refused to give her. After coming home from the courthouse I’d taken it and hidden it. My mother had screamed and cussed and tried everything to make me reveal its whereabouts to her but I refused to tell.

That had been the first night my mother had hit me.

I’d taken a journal that I had been using myself and thrown it into our fireplace, making my mother think it was my fathers. She’d screeched like some devil’s minion straight from hell as the flaming light from the burning journal flickered ominously in her dark eyes. That was the only moment I’d been scared of my mother. She grabbed me by the hair and threw me into the table, punching me and kicking me. But I endured through it all, holding my tongue. She could never find out about it, ever.

From that day on I’d read it in secret, making sure she was asleep before climbing out onto the roof and reading it beneath the stars which he’d loved so much.