To Read Part One: Away
Part Two: Home
He kept trying to focus as people walked with urgency and sense of abandonment talking into their cell phones without a care in the world. He looked at his sneakers torn and frayed. He kept wondering if he would remember her. If she were important enough to remember. He was ten when she left. He had spent the entire day wondering about her. He imagined her in the plane just sitting near a window looking at an endless sky. She would not be as he remembered. He thinks of a mother so young and sweet- full of life with joy in her eyes. He is fourteen today and the day seemed bigger than his age, more important as questions to his future loomed in the distance.
He secretly unloved her a little more each night as thoughts of a fake mother’s care would haunt him. “Why do I not feel anything?” he would whisper before falling asleep. He had always been troubled with these thoughts since she left. In a way to escape he would skip class and walk through the mall with his girlfriend Becky and tell her stories of how he could beat up any guy and that his father was in prison for killing a man. None of this was true, but he didn’t care for Becky, she was in a way just someone to date as an excuse to have someone to talk to. Her blond hair fell medium length, she was just pretty enough to get a guys attention, but a life of constant let down made her cold. He could tell her anything and she wouldn’t care. They would go behind the old gym building during math class to smoke cheap cigarettes and talk of dreams about leaving “this” place. When he was younger, around eleven he had a worn picture of his mom that he kept in a shoe box under his bed. He lost his temper one summer and set the box on fire in the woods behind his “host” family’s house.
He sat on the bench with his head down thinking about all those times he wanted a mother. He had idealistic pictures of mothers from tv who seemed only to exist to love their children. These images ate away at his heart like a slow moving plague that constantly fractured the very foundation of his soul. His heart felt black, his life was in quiet peril from too much pain of memories that may or may not have ever been. He wondered if there would be answers to his questions and if she could make him feel better by just saying “Sorry”, but as these thoughts crept into his mind there was a languish in the amount of time he sat on this bench. What could his mother of done that was so bad that she would abandon him at ten and never look back? There was a frenzy in the air as people pulled and pushed luggage across linoleum floors. He was waiting just waiting for a person who he once loved and remembered. He thinks about being six and running down the hall falling down and scrapping his knee. She ran down the hall and picked him up and kissed his knee, “Mommy is here and I love you very much” she would say smiling. Getting up from the bench he looked up from his worn shoes and saw her coming off the plane with tears in her eyes…as he had done when he was six he smiled and said to himself, “I love you too”.
To Be Continued…
