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We lived a dozen different places, half a dozen different countries by the time I turned ten.
And it was at ten when we ended up somewhere as cold as my father himself.
Russia.
Why, I never knew, knew better than to ask.
It likely had to do with the widespread debauchery, the way no one would look down on him for drinking too much, fighting too much, being a shitty provider and father to a growing boy.
It was in Russia when one night he went out and never came home.
If you could call the shack a home.
A shack I wasn't sure he actually paid for, thinking it was more likely he had found it abandoned, and decided to squat so all his money could go to boozing and drugging and who the hell knew what else.
I waited, knowing he was prone to benders, out burning the town down for two or three nights.
But three nights turned into four.
Four to five.
By the seventh day, I knew there was something wrong. People didn't go out drinking for seven days in a row, never stopping home to change clothes or bathe.
Me, I went looking.
Down alleys.
In bars.
But there was nothing.
Not a single trace of him.
I would learn many years later that he had been caught with his buddies, gang-raping a girl who was just barely sixteen, who had the bad fortune of walking home from a babysitting job thinking she was safe when it was only a few blocks away. Pulled into an alley two doors from her parents' home, left bleeding and broken and just barely able to go on with her life after.
He got shipped off to Petak Island Prison, a shitehole built for shiteheads.
At the time, though, I was just ten years old, alone in the world. My father had never been much of a father, but he was someone who made sure I had shelter, someone who offered a bit of protection.
I was mature for my age, but not ready to be alone in a country whose customs I didn't know, whose towns I didn't know my way around fully, whose language I only had a slight grasp on.
That being said, I knew enough about the country to know I didn't want to end up in an orphanage - at least not in that day - so I needed to stay under the radar of the law.
The winter that year nearly did me in. I had thought I understood cold, but nothing had prepared me for a Russian winter type of cold. The snow fell for days, unrelenting, merciless, trapping me in the shack with no way to start a fire because snow had started falling in the chimney, and no way to escape because the door was barricaded shut with a drift.
I hadn't eaten in five days when I couldn't take the clawing, unending hunger in my stomach, making my brain foggy, jackhammering a headache into my temples. I forced open a window and literally burrowed my way out, coming across a rabbit half-eaten by wildlife, biting into what was left of its organs with an uncontrollable need for sustenance in my already too thin body. It was right then when I was come upon.
By a man in the woods with an accent I didn't know, his Russian more choppy than my own, but disgust a look that could be read in every language.
He said a string of words in what I knew to be Spanish even though it was one I spoke worst of all, tripping into Russian and English, saying something about Rough fucking place.
I didn't understand, and I didn't have the strength to fight him when he reached for me, pulling me with him, tossing me into the back of a truck.
Bijan was Iranian born, but like my father, moved around. At first, I didn't think to wonder, let alone ask, why. Because he fed me. He sheltered me. He became more like a father than the one by blood ever was.
It wasn't until he sold me that I understood.
"Sorry, kid. I need to get across an ocean. Can't have you weighing me down."
It was then that I understood that just because someone showed kindness didn't mean they were kind.
I lucked out in a way, finding myself sold into labor, not sex, tossed in a mine in the Ukraine, made to work sixteen exhaustive hours a day, live on less than a street dog could find, developing a cough that would plague me every waking moment for the year I was down there before finding a way out one afternoon while one of the guards was off fucking a girl in the back of his truck.
Eleven going on twelve, I got myself to freedom.
Or so I thought.
I got far and fast and found myself in another land, with customs and languages I didn't understand. But bigger. Taller. Stronger. Fiercer.
