Losing Control

Trapped. My father and mother were both drug addicts, they didn’t see a purpose of living. I was born on accident, they had no intention of taking care of me nor any intention of giving me away to an orphanage. I felt trapped living with them everyday, I was stuck in a small house on the coast of a barely populated island, between four walls that almost never lost my sight, everyday I wanted to run out of that house, run as far as my feet could take me, the only problem was not having anywhere to run away to.

I went to a small public school on the island. There were 54 students, grades 1-12, only three others were of my age. None of us got along very well but we weren’t enemies either, we were more just acquaintances that had to put up with each other than anything else. Yet even though we were not close, we all knew what each other were going through. One had lost his younger sister two years ago of leukemia at the age of 5, their family had spent almost all of their money on her treatments. Another only lived with her mom, her dad hadn’t died but left the family and the island behind when she was very young. He took all the money, leaving them with nothing but their house that had no one to pay for. Out of all three, she was the one whom I knew the best and liked the most because we both worked at the same restaurant at the same time and would occasionally take walks together to try and take our minds off of everything that was happening. The last one was the most well off and fortunate but barely talked. His dad was the principle of our school and his mom was the owner of the restaurant that the other girl and I worked at. I had never seen his house but I expected that it was at least three times bigger than mine.

At 5 pm I started walking back home from school, it was my day off today as it was a national holiday. I tried my hardest to avoid going home but I couldn’t stay at the school studying forever, the building closed at 4:3o on holidays but I decided to circle around the “campus” (as in a quarter of an acre grass area with a pond of overgrown bull kelp in the middle) for 30 minutes. I did this not because my parents were patiently waiting for me at home to hit me like a lot of abusive parents would but because when I got home I’d always find them sprawled on the floor or on our tattered couch, sleeping time away. There was no use in trying to help them recover, I was no therapist (but I doubt even a therapist could get them sane again) and I had grown up seeing them like this, for me, this was what was normal. I quietly went inside our house, though I would say it was more of a hut; I never had an intention to try and wake them up. I prepared a simple soup for dinner and read a book for two hours before drifting to sleep on a few old sheets on the floor.

“Mom!” I shouted, opening my eyes to the smell of smoke, I felt my face, I was sweating badly. I looked over to the other side of our house to my parents still sleeping soundly. “Mom? Dad? Someone get up!”

The smell got stronger and stronger, I untangled myself from my sheets and ran to the door but something shocked me. I took a step back. Fire. I had just but my foot in a small flame that was slowly enlarging. There was a fire eating up our house. I screamed louder for my parents to wake up but they still just laid there. That’s when I saw it, my dad holding a lighter in his right hand and pills all over around him with the drug bottle in his left. My mom’s face was as swollen as ever but yet when she was sleeping she looked at peace.

I went over and shook them to wake up. They didn’t move. I checked their pulses, still beating slowly. The smoke was getting to the point where it was almost impossible to breath, and I could see the fire slowly spreading around me. I ran through the spaces where the fire had not yet spread and went to our door. There was no way of getting my parents out, especially when they had just taken drugs and wanted to die here. If I didn’t leave on my own, I’d die here with them which I guessed was their intention. Our house didn’t have any windows to jump out of so the door was the only option, I struggled to let the knob budge, it wouldn’t move. No this can’t be happening. Every part of our house was slowly chipping away and yet the door wouldn’t budge. My hands were sweating more than ever, it felt like I had just dipped my hand in a bowl of boiling hot water.

“Please! Someone!” I didn’t even notice tears coming out of my eyes as I kicked the door over and over again. My hands were of no use anymore, they only slipped right off of the knob. I flung myself at the door as the fire encircled me. I felt like I was burning, dying, until a cold bucket of water splashed over me. I finally opened my eyes.

A crowd was standing right in front of me, staring at me in shock. Had I been sleep-walking? Sleep-screaming? I ran out of the building to an open field of stars not knowing how else to process this, the starts seemed to all be staring at me as the group of people, my classmates did, as if they were trying to hold back their laughter as I half-consciously embarrassed myself. It wasn’t all just a dream, it was a memory that had come back into my mind, into my dream, after years of therapy and years of trying to move on from it.

“Hazel!” I froze where I was. The voice kept calling me as his footsteps got closer..and closer..and closer, until he was standing right behind me. He spun me around into a tight hug. We stayed there, just like that, for what felt like an hour. The only person who could calm me after a storm. The only one who could heal my unhealable wound. The one who could wake me up from my nightmare without laughing or mocking me. The only one who could take me away from my shattered life.

I could only live because of him.