Warrior

I was torn. Hope had worn off long ago and I was feeding on the way helplessness that served itself to my soul. I could feel myself losing to the darkness that began housing me some time ago, and I’ve come to accept it. There’s no light for people like me, at least that’s what I grew up being told. So of course it must be true as reality only seemed to prove it.

I shivered at the coldness that surrounded me as I unknowingly faced the house I escaped, where all my broken dreams were created and surfaced. Something had drawn me here, as I felt a connection ever so strong tugging at the invisible strings that guided me.

My eyes glazed over as I saw a woman. Her posture, so tense yet so firm. One of a warrior. I wonder, what battle had she fought? Her eyes, lacking warmth yet holding so much fierceness. Eyes of a true lone survivor. I think, what struggles did she overcome? That smile, filled with untold suffering yet holding fulfilled promises. A smile that’s broken. I question, who caused her pain?

I then look closer, and suddenly the house is now a home without walls as if to broadcast its deepest darkest secrets. A man walks into the living room with a wobble in his steps. In the far right corner holds a cowering woman, whom he towers over yelling words that cut like a sword. When he grasps her neck and continues yelling words of a drunken man, the scene blurs and shifts toward the stairs. A little girl, possibly no more than six, stands at the top with silent tears and an all-knowing look upon her face as she watches her parents. Then, as if a coded language, she rapped her little knuckles on the rail surface of the stairs twice.

Both scenes focused at once, and the man immediately dropped his wife and began clumsily heading up the stairs towards his daughter. Once again, the scene shifted and I was now staring into the girl’s room as she laid on her bed unmoving, her father on top of her. It was all too much and I shut my eyes tightly only to open them and find the scenes carrying on like a slideshow. I watched the little girl grow, her mother weaken, and the father leave. Different men came and left the house, none there for the mother. The little girl became a teen lost in the dark depths of reality, and was living a life of prostitution and drugs.

The woman had seen enough and everything froze. The home was no longer, instead the fallen house it had become, and the girl was gone. My darkness had been revealed, as it showed her my whole past. That girl was me and I was she. The woman turned away from the house and walked away from that childhood with a head held as if it were reaching for the heavens, and it was then I knew. She was my future, who I was to become.

I had to battle through the tunnel of dark in order to find my way out to the light. Hope had only rested in the box of lost and found, waiting for me to claim it. I walked the opposite direction of the woman, away from my future to conquer my past and make it through the present.