Member-only story
It Was Too Much To Ask…
Rando 28: SFW
As soon as she walked in, she felt the tension. It was why she had stayed away all these years. She hated feeling this way. She had never been the issue, to begin with, it was their conservative closed-mindedness that was the issue. Their unwillingness to accept the truth. The real facts of the way life was, there was no way around it, and it had been that way all her life. She had never set out to hurt anyone. She simply wanted authenticity in her life. Was it simply too much to ask or to bear? Apparently, for most of her family, it was too much to ask for.
Especially her parents led the pack of tension and close-mindedness, which baffled her beyond belief, as they were the ones who had raised her to follow her dreams and desires and to live openly and honestly as best as she knew how. Now, here she was at fifty-eight, being blamed for doing exactly what she had been told all her life. It was such a double standard, and she hated them for it. Her father was a drunkard and abusive, her mother his punching bag as well as the submissive gossip who’d sell her mother to better her life.
How could she trust any of that? She couldn’t. It’s why she walked away from it all at sixteen and lived on the streets, homeless for two years before finding an LGBTQIA+ Homeless Shelter for youth. Those earliest years during the height of the AIDS Crisis were brutal. Death lingering on every corner, moldering and robbing young lives. She, herself, couldn’t escape it either and was diagnosed with AIDS at twenty. The victim of a vicious Hate Crime at the age of twenty-one nearly left her dead and a cavalcade of colorless coffins cradling KS bruised victims. A suicide attempt at twenty-two, a cocaine-fueled addiction, and yet her family felt she was weak.
So much strength, so much fortitude, and now she returned home because Mama was dying from bone marrow cancer. Her knee-length pleated pink skirt brushed her legs as she walked up the steps to knock on the door. Lilies in her hand, as they were her mother’s favorite. The door opened, and her oldest brother greeted her coldly, “Daddy is passed out drunk in his chair, and Mama just had her morphine, so it might be a while before she wakes up.”
“It’s ok, Cecil. I’ll wait. But thank you.” He didn’t respond at all and simply walked back to the sofa and the football game.
He can be such an arrogant prick at times, she thought as she went to the kitchen. Turning her head, she saw her mother’s empty pink wingback chair. She turned left and headed to her parent’s bedroom. Her mother was motionless and ice-cold to the touch. She was gone. In her lap, a note. “Darling Henry, I’m so sorry. You were right. You’ve ALWAYS been my Audrey. Love Mama
