Cloud in the sky

A cold and snowy Christmas day. I know, very cliché. But this is really what happened. I’m not going to talk about the beautiful snowflakes sprinkling and slowly falling as everyone looked at them. I'm not going to talk about Santa, also called “Dad in a weird and cheap costume he bought at the dollar store yesterday”, giving out gifts, as the kids pretend to be surprised when they receive the only thing they wrote on their Christmas list. And I'm surely not going to describe the smell of the weird pie grandma made, wanting to make us happy even though she knew her special talent wasn’t cooking. The reason I'm writing this today is to share the story of little Cloud. My little Cloud.I’m not like other kids. I don’t define myself as a kid, considering them little crawling monsters with sticky hands. I think of myself as more of a broken little being. So of course I went to sleep late on Christmas Eve, but not to see Santa come, nor to talk about what I thought my Christmas presents would be with my cousins, but to stare at my ceiling, wondering if it felt as heavy with all the snow on it as I felt with my sadness. So as the hours passed, the ceiling didn’t fall but the sun showed up. My skin still felt rough and my eyes were praying to God to make the sun go away. That was my sign to close my curtains, telling my body that it was alright to rest a bit.While I was flying high up in the clouds, not even afraid to fall, I heard knocking in the sky. “Keep flying, just keep flying”. But the knock and the man behind those atrocious sounds never gave up. “Hi honey! How are you? Are you excited? Are you hungry? Blah blah blah blah?” The words seemed to all collide in my head, refraining them from making sense. As I grunted, a wave of coldness attacked my body. The window opened and my dad smiled at me. “It’s Christmas honey!”. What a surprise! The worst month of the whole year has the worst holiday. It’s not that I don't like Christmas in general. It’s the memories surrounding it. My mom, Lisa. The worst mom that anyone could have. Not that she was mean or anything. But she wasn’t meant to be a mother. Life didn’t go easy on her. I feel like she didn’t have enough love inside her to give some to me. I don’t blame her, but I’ll never be able to say that I liked her. She died on Christmas day, back in 2017. It was never the same after that.The smell of overcooked bacon and eggs struck me as soon as I stepped out of my bedroom. It was comforting, to say the least. I sat down and saw a box with holes in front of me. I looked over at my dad, filming me. He had a weird obsession with filming every little moment. I always found that kind of cute. My hands put away the beautiful bow that sat on top of the box. I started to open it and what I saw inside was… a bird. A little bird that looked at me with fear wondering if it was going to go back in the dark again. That’s when I started to panic. I know it might seem like it’s nothing, but my mind was starting to go insane. How could I take care of such a fragile little thing? I can’t even take care of myself. I looked over at my dad and the smile that illuminated his face slowly started to fade away, replaced with sadness. He could probably see right through me. Don’t get me wrong. I wasn’t ungrateful about the gift, but a part of me wanted to make the bird fly away from here. How could he be happy here?Along with the little unnamed feathered friend was: a cage, food, and some little toys to distract him from the mess of a family we are. I spent all day looking at him, wondering what went through his tiny brain. Maybe he wishes he could fly away from here, go back to his family. Or fly up in the sky, to feel the clouds caress its feathers. I wish I could do that sometimes.As the day went on, my love for it grew. I started coming up with names, but they all seemed too… normal? That’s when I got the idea to call him Cloud. My love for the sky and everything surrounding it started in December when I was 7 years old. The snow falling from the sky looked like the stars were falling onto us. Right at that moment, I saw a little bird flying. What was he still doing here? Did he like the coldness of our winter or was he scared of where he was going because all he ever knew was this calm little town?Two weeks later, Cloud seemed to like me a lot. He followed me everywhere. Didn’t he realize that I didn’t know how to take care of him? My dad had to do everything. I did give him little treats when he was a good boy, but I didn’t want to deal with the bad part of him. My dad wasn’t even mad at me. He took care of it like it was always meant for him to do so.One night, as I was still not sleeping in the middle of the night. That’s when I realized something. I became like my mom. Even though she loved me, she couldn’t take care of me. She did little things so my dad wouldn’t get mad and think she didn’t make an effort. I couldn’t be there for Cloud, but my dad would always be. It’s so weird to become the one thing you always feared to be. And with all that, I now know that this was the best Christmas gift I would ever have. He died two years later. It wasn’t the same after...