When I 'm Gone?

From the ages of 8- 14, I lived in a very volatile home. Coming home from school, I never knew if it was going to be a quiet day in my house or if the entire house would be engulfed in screaming. I dreaded the weekends, that meant that everyone was going to be home. Everyone home meant that things could easily go up to flames in just a millisecond. I tried my best to never be home, I would spend the days with my friends. I knew that when I got home there was a 90% chance of everyone fighting. One day in the summer of 2012, things got too heated, and my mom finally decided to move. We packed up everything in a few hours while my stepfather was at work. We moved into my best friend’s home for a few days until we found an apartment within the school district to move into.

There is one loss in my life that affected many aspects of my life for many years, the divorce of my parents. I was in barley entering the first grade and the tender age of five, soon to turn six, when my parents spent their last night as a married couple. I do not have many memories of my parents as a couple but I do remember the day my Daddy left. He was a policeman and I watched as his cruiser drove away from our family home. I remember my mom crying and not being willing to console me or explain to me what was happening. All I knew is there was a fight, my dad left, it seemed different than other times when he left, and my mom was crying. Everything about my life changed in the blink of a five year old’s eyes which is what makes this loss so significant in my life.

I sat there in my room with tears flowing down my blush pink cheeks. Wondering what was wrong with me, as a salty tear ran along my dried out chapped lips. I thought to myself,” Why am I so miserable? What did I do to deserve this? How am I going to escape this life?” I started to ponder that this was the end of my life, this is how I was going to be, sorrowful. At the lowest point of my life, mother came barging through the door with the look of cavernous concern on her face. She knew that it was time for something to be done, whether I agreed or not.

I walked away feeling like I was a complete failure and that I didn’t deserve to go on. On the way home my mother tried to talk to me, but, I put on my headphones and cried silently. Once we were home my father asked how it went. The tears that were in my eyes and they became more evident as my shoulders and chest were shaking and trembling. The only sound in the room was the sound of me crying and wailing. I started crumbling and falling to the ground and my mother and father rushed to my side. They held me until the tears came to a stop and a little bit afterwards

Six years ago, a summer afternoon, my dad hugged me and I said “I will be gone for three days, I have a job in Austin, but I promise that I will be back before your birthday. I promise.” Days, weeks, months almost two years passed by and I did not receive any phone call or text message from him. Throughout that time my dad was gone, my mom told me that she was getting the papers ready to divorce my dad. I was noticing that the last three-four years that I was living with both of my parents, their relationship was getting worse. It was not a healthy situation for anyone in the house. What I mean about not being healthy is that my mother and father were damaging one another, emotionally and verbally, which my brothers and I would watch everything. Every day was the same routine, we forgot how it was to have a peaceful home. Around that moment, I honestly never thought divorce was going to be their solution.

It all started on a warm sunny day, my dad had just arrived from Michigan. He came into the house gave my siblings, my mother and me a hug and told us the big news. “We are moving to Michigan” he said. He said it so calmly as if expecting my siblings, my mother and myself to react in a good way. Immediately I started to panic, I didn’t want to leave the place I grew up in. I was only eleven years old, I didn’t know how the people in Michigan would be. Finally I spoke “ I don’t want to move dad, I love it here!” which he responded with “I’m sorry but we are going to move because we can’t afford to live here anymore” He said this so emotionless as if not knowing how this could affect me. I hardly got any sleep that night for the fact that my parents were arguing for what felt like all night, but in reality was just an hour.

I constantly feared the worst-case scenario: death. That feeling I had, it was something I wouldn 't wish upon anyone. My heart ached, hoping and praying for the best. Monday, we went to visit her, and she looked awful. She couldn 't even stand. Something in my mind told me she wasn 't going to make it. I tried to fight that feeling, but once we were home, I collapsed on my bead and burst into tears. I couldn 't shake the feeling she was going to die. It was the one time I wished for me to be wrong. Unfortunately, I wasn 't. Tuesday, she ended up passing away while being transported to an emergency animal treatment center.

My father finally spoke up and said abruptly, we are moving to California. I said what!. That answer moving to California, was almost equal to my uncle telling me "Your Sister Jackie is dead." I knew that my girlfriend, my anchor on earth was disappearing from my life. And now she was gone, 35 days after I lost my sister. My earth angle, I dreamed of being my wife was gone. I felt like I was having a nightmare and couldn't wake up, how could all this be happening to me. Despair sit like a stone in my stomach, like concrete boots dragging me toward what felt like my inevitable end. "I'm not going to make it. "I was in a state of melancholy depression.Laced with a fatal sense of my own wretchedness. I was fourteen years old and felt like I was

I knelt beside the form of my dog, a friend from birth, dying. His trusting eyes looked into mine as he breathed his last breath. I cried more that day than I had ever cried in my entire life. One of my best friends, dead. But no matter how sad and horrifying that day was for me, it will always be implanted in my memory as the first time I ever lost someone close to me.

I remember a time when life felt whole, I was young, I spent whole summers with my Father in Oregon and I’d come home to a fresh scented home with my Mother and Step Father, It seemed that whenever I came back, my Mom had just cleaned the house, it made me feel special in a way. I used to have friends come over frequently, but they were family friends rather than the people I went to school with, these friends understood me, they were real. It was a simpler time where I could be weird and not have to worry about acceptance. When I was about eleven or twelve years old, my Mother sat my brother and I down at the table. When she uttered the word divorce, my brother burst into tears, yet I remained stone cold, I guess I had seen it coming, I knew

I had felt like the alien from the moon landing in this wooded, crowded place. That was five years ago, now I still look around and can not fathom this new planet I landed on so long ago. Being young in an unfamiliar environment caused me to sink into a hardened shell were no one could see me and I could not see them making things even harder on myself. On top of social inconvenience, home life was less than satisfactory. Tensions ran very high between my parents. They no longer loved nor even cared for eachother and this diseases of hatred and strain only forced everyone further and further apart. My only refuge was in my head and later that became an even darker place than my physical world. Over a year ago last February would be the month my father travels to Las Vegas to consequently meet his current girlfriend at a hotel bar. Not for another three months will he move out of our house and get a divorce to my mother, then he will move in with his girlfriend in Alabama within the next eight months. Now this is a common story in our current day and age, but everyone feels differently in every situation. Particularly, I was heartbroken and felt unwanted by someone who

Silence. As though there is no life. I observe the house, unchanged since it happened. Wandering past framed photos of her. My mother. This house, once a home, now feels uninhabited, empty. But I know my dad is in the other room. I don’t even remember the last time we spoke. Time is the last thing you think about when something you love is taken from you. Like a child stripped from their favourite soft toy. The one that’s always with them, first pick for sleeping with. It’s strange how something big impacts people in different ways. I’m quite like dad. Emotions control your soul leaving nothing but a mangled body. Losing her made it feel like there was no reason to

Still not thinking anything of it, I just assumed she wanted me home because we were having a family dinner, my dad included. It was a normal dinner, with discussions about how our day went and jokes going around the table. Then directly as we finished eating and all the plates were cleared, I was about to go upstairs to my room when my parents said to sit down and that we needed to talk. I thought this was very strange and I thought to myself maybe this is it. They said the expected, it isn’t your fault, just sometimes things change and don’t work out, nothing will be different and so on. I sat there in silence, until they said they were getting a divorce. Once they said that word, divorce, it hit me. I could feel myself starting to fall into tears, so I just got up and left the table. I couldn’t listen to another word, because it was heartbreaking and I had never felt this sort of pain before. As I said earlier, I had seen it coming for years, but never expected it to actually happen. I began wondering why, why now, in the middle of my highschool years where there is already so much stress. I was angry and I didn’t have anyone to blame, but them. Even though I was very mad at both of my parents, I took most of my anger out on my dad. I was always closer to my mom and I could tell she tried her hardest to make it

In 2006 my parents had sat my younger brother and I down to talk to us. They looked so serious, my mother was crying and I was scared. They told us they were going to get a divorce. I didn’t understand why because they were happy together and they still loved each other, they even told us that while they were

Devastated, I ran to my room gushing my eyes out. All these emotions going through my head of how my life would be without my parents in the same room or even house. From what I remember it all started about mid-June, the weeks before that were crucial. My parents would always argue over how to deal with a situation between me and my brother, Skyler. They hardly spoke to one another, but when they did they would just start bickering. I remember, one night after dinner they both went into ''their'' room with the door locked yelling at one another. Skyler and I didn’t know what to do, so we went downstairs and tried to figure out what was going to happen. With a scared tone I asked if mom and dad were going to get a divorce?" He answered back '' No, they love each other, they wouldn’t do that to us." That following night, was a school night everything was quiet except for my crying. I couldn’t sleep; all I was thinking about how it's going to affect my family.