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The World as I Know It- Chapter 12
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Prose/Short Stories Chapter 12
After the combination of my second encounter with James and the betrayal of my family, I didn’t think I could function anymore. James destroyed the only thing that made me human: my belief that people are invariably good. But now that my support structure had disintegrated, I was truly at the end of my rope with it beginning to wind around my neck. I could not breathe. Every exhale was forced and labored. It was no longer a voluntary action. I had to will myself to continue existing.
It was one thing to keep living. It was a whole other thing to motivate myself to see James again or see any of those people that would prove my demise with their whispered giggles let alone my family that had possibly hurt me more than James, at least emotionally.
I was all out of options. The only choice left was to run away and pretend none of this ever happened. But where would I go? I couldn’t afford a hotel room. I couldn’t survive living on the streets. What was left?
I decided to spend my days in the bookstore writing in my journal and the evenings in the porch of an abandoned home hoping no one would find me there. When it got cold some nights, I had to squeeze myself into the empty doghouse in the backyard and live with the stench of what used to sleep there.
I didn’t have access to a television so I didn’t know if my parents had started this county-wide search effort to find me. Maybe they didn’t even notice I was gone. I knew if I saw myself on television so would everyone else around me, and they would drag me home in exchange for whatever meager reward my parents could manage to put together.
Eating was the worst part. I was able to find some food in the dumpster out behind a fast food restaurant in the middle of the night as to not draw suspicion. But the rest of the day I had only dirty water to drink from what collected in the buckets behind the abandoned house.
