A Change

I was eight. It was the end of the day. My brother was crying, my parents were yelling, I was caught in the frey. I was curled in to a ball, between corner and a wall. Just like today, and yesterday and the day before, my soul longed for something more.

I wanted my parents to stop fighting. All I wanted a belly that was full. I was scared. My only comfort remembering that this isn’t my home. But it was. That was the thing. There was no where else to go. No escape for me. I remembered the dinner I had the night before. Then heard my dad say it couldn’t go on anymore. Everything I’d done, all the moping and crying, all it did was delay the inevitabl.

No matter how hard they tried, no matter how much time my parents spent it was never enough to win in the end. It never drove away the suffocating pain. The traffic, the head lights, they left me insane. They had helped me before, when I told them what was wrong, but it always went back to the way it was before. So this time, I did something new. I got up and asked myself what I needed to do. There was a mess in the kitchen and everything else besides, but I decided to start with a dish at a time. Slowly, slowly the pile grew. I couldn’t clean them faster than make them, can you? I tried to carry it all and never fall. I became a diplomat, carving peace on a wall. But the tower of dishes, one day, did fall. I guess it was bound to fail. I couldn’t fix it all. Now I sit, after the ashes are cleared. Wondering when it all disappeared.