Chrystina Antoine

I always had known it would happen. Mom kept staying out more and more, she kept  taking us to different apartments behind Dad’s back, their arguments got louder and louder  throughout the house. The shoveling of me in between it all, taking all their grips and criticisms  about each other like I'm some therapist myself. I go to therapy, I'm not one myself. Not during  this moment, not ever.  

Though, I was only 9 to 11. The memory of what exact age I was is lost on me. But after  this, I knew this was no family anymore. I knew anytime I walked up those 5 steps that I've  always walked up into my childhood home I was now walking into a tiger’s den where only  snakes lie and the tiger watch. Ready to burst out into a million flames of anger with its roar and  blow the house away with its breath. Where every step was littered with fragile eggshells, as  fragile as the house itself. Still, I didn't think, or maybe just didn’t want to think, that any real  change would occur. that everything wouldn’t change.  

It was an evening, a cool evening after just lying weak in the heat a couple hours prior,  marinating in the humidity. School’s out, and I had all the time in the world to reflect. But time  waits for no man. As the voices from Dad’s TV faded into the background, I stared at the front  door I had stared at a million times before, except this time the door wasn’t turning open for a  noble purpose. Not a shred of a smile or a grocery bag either, it was now the dead of night after  all, wasting away the pointless days with mindless entertainment, deluding myself into being happy. And then it turned night, the black void that flowed into the house and sucked up  everything that was left. The door instead swung open to where my Mother’s voice was on the  other side of the pitch-black darkness.  

Nothing else had to be said, just a ‘Let's go,’ and that was it.  

It went like a blur, I pack the most I could remember, my Brother filling his backpack  with trinkets and toys he couldn’t depart with, not now, maybe not even ever. Though in the end,  much would be lost in the depths and crevices of the piles of boxes. It was almost insulting how  we had treated it like a normal outing, like we were just going on a little vacation and coming  right back. But there would be no returning, not until years later when nothing is the same, where  everything had changed, I had changed. and I didn’t welcome it with open arms. All it deserved  was a blank stare, rooted on this grotesque face. 

I ran to my Brother, lights and colors blending and blurring with each other as my vision  shakes with my rushing. With how fast my heart is pumping, the night just turns into one quick  messy blur. After gathering everything I think I need (I always feel like I'm missing something) I  sauntered to my Dad’s room, the hallway feeling a lot longer than it actually is. I just repeated  the words my Mom said to me, ‘We’re going,’ and that was it.  

All he did was sit up in surprise, a small ‘oh’ leaving his mouth. And so, I left.  

I wonder why I didn’t hug him at all, maybe if I did his shocked face wouldn’t have  circled in my mind all the way to my gut for the whole ride to the unfamiliar and undiscovered lands. Or maybe it was because I mistakenly took that hand stretched out from the darkness,  urging me to rush forward and join it within the depths of the night. Mistaking that hand for  salvation, when it was just dragging me deeper into its endless caverns with twists and turns that  I’ll never escape from. Where my empty mind now laid at the bottom of the ocean, waiting for  the time my body returns to sea foam and I don’t exist anymore. I was stepping into a dark forest  of void and leaving the bright light of the campsite. Stepping into a dark unfamiliar world with  new ideals, new places, new routines, new creatures, new me.  

And when I get off this ship, all the parts would’ve been completely replaced for  something anew, so no one could recognize me again.