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Every single time she would look at me, keeping her gaze on my face for longer than necessary, she was looking for signs. For little tells that I was remembering. That my true self was coming to the surface.
She wasn’t doing it out of love. She didn’t keep me out of love—she did it out of fear, because god forbid that our neighbors found out that her daughter didn’t fit in the usual mold our society demanded us to fit in. God forbid that she actually let me be who I was supposed to be. Instead, she caged me, locked me in my mind with the help of other psychologists.
My hand tightened around the orange bottle of pills that was barely opened. Before I could stop and think of what I was doing, I walked to my bathroom and emptied the contents of the bottle into the toilet, flushing it immediately.
My own mother was terrified of me, and for whatever inexplicable reason, I didn’t feel sad. I didn’t… I didn’t feel a thing.
Now I knew why we could never connect. Why, no matter how hard I tried, we could never sit down and talk like two grown people. She feared me. She didn’t want to be near me. She let me go to Seattle and when I came back, she was angry. She didn’t want me here.
And I didn’t want to be with her.
I walked back to my room, looking at the bare walls of my childhood, at the single photo on the shelf where my books stood, from one of the last dinners when we were a family. I had no idea how I had never noticed it before, but I was the only one smiling. Both my father and mother looked grim, as if they didn’t want to be there.
I didn’t fail to notice the distance they created between me and them.
I didn’t fail to notice the fact that the sharp knives suddenly disappeared from the house once I came back. Or how the shed behind the house where we kept all our gardening tools suddenly had a lock and I didn’t have a key.
I didn’t fail to notice the fact that my mother went out most nights, choosing to spend time with somebody else rather than me.
There was always a reason behind every single action, and hers screamed of fear. Fear of me.
I couldn’t stay here. I couldn’t live here, with her, not knowing what she would do next to keep me in line, to keep me as I was. She was happier with me complacent because I wasn’t fully living. Whatever drugs they gave me were making me feel like a zombie. I was here, but not quite. I was alive but not quite living.
And it was all her doing.
Something coiled in the center of my chest, right around my heart, pushing me toward my wardrobe and the sports bag I kept from the time I played volleyball in high school. Winworth High was hell for me, and I couldn’t wait to leave it behind, because I never belonged.
I could never quite fit in. I never understood the cliques, the popular kids, the less popular ones, the looks from other students, because most of them knew what I was like before the accident.
There was Danika before the accident, and Danika after the accident.
The one after the accident wasn’t filled with life, wonder, and many other things like the one before the accident was.
I started pushing clothes and toiletries inside the bag, because I knew without a doubt, I didn’t belong in this house. But Winworth—Winworth was my playground. Lazarus Morass was mine, no matter what, and I was his.
I just needed time. Time to figure things out, to remember everything, to become my true self once again, far away from my mother.
My winter jacket was left hanging on the chair in the corner of my room, and as I picked up my bag, I took it as well, pushing my feet into the black military boots I had since last year. She wasn’t going to control my life anymore.
But she wasn’t going to live happily without me either.
I walked toward the living room and looked around, trying to find the stack of little papers she always kept around. My eyes zeroed in on them, sitting on top of the coffee table next to the wall, along with the pen she was adamant about keeping there, in case she had something to write down.
I crouched down and wrote what I had told Lazarus.
I remember everything.
As I dropped it down on top of the other little papers, I realized one thing—this wasn’t my home. It never was, and it never would be.
One Year Later
My Dark Star.
My Danika.
My beginning and my ending.
My everything.
