I used to think my family was normal. I wasn’t a part of the 37% of kids my age without two parents in the house. I had a mom and a dad and even a little sister. My life was… normal, safe, great maybe. What I failed to realize was that my family was not so perfect in fact my family would soon be in that 37% of broken families. I would soon be an 18 year old starting college as her life is crumbling around her. Before we get to that let me start at the beginning. The sorta, maybe happy.
“Are you excited for your senior year!” My mother said with the brightest smile on her face. My mother is a dark skin beautiful black woman. She is 5’3, with short hair, and dark void brown eyes that she passed on to me. “No.” I replied coldly. Why would I be happy about having to now navigate the world on my own soon. Why would I be happy when I have almost crippling anxiety and next to no friends. I was entering a very scary world of adulthood without anyone. “Why not?” My mother walked into my room leaving her post in the doorway. We had been living in this apartment for some odd years now and I was beginning to hate it here. My room was like an oven or a freezer depending on what the weather was like outside. That day it was an oven. The walls were so thin that you could hear every little thing the neighbors did and they in turn could hear us. A long dragging impeded crack covered with paint road across my wall. My room was a mess of clothes, old dishes, my McDonald’s bag from last night. I was never one for cleaning up my room. My room simply represented what I was feeling and what I was feeling was like I was drowning. I am always drowning. “I’m just not!” I raised my voice in the kind of annoyed way that I do when anything around the topic of me growing up suffices. “Why? You get to live on your own and do whatever you want. And you get to meet new people.” My mom said as if she was remembering when she was younger. I let silence fill the room. My mother looked at me a little more than I left the room. I felt bad. I still feel bad about that day.
Fast forward to the first day of school I woke up happy. Confidence was the lie I told myself that day. I made a TikTok transition of me the night before and today. I was hoping that this would give me some sort of good luck. That I would somehow bump into a cute boy and he’d like me. That random girl would pull me under her wing and we would be friends forever. “Bye Dad!” Me and my little sister shouted as we hopped out of our fathers car. This year was… gonna be different.
Comments (0)
See all