WebNovels

Chapter 13 - CHAPTER THIRTEEN

After that day, I felt myself shrinking even more. I didn't know there was even room left for me to get smaller, but I did. I stayed in my room as much as I could. It became the only place where I could hide. I didn't want to see anyone. I didn't want to hear anyone. I didn't even want to eat. My appetite just vanished like air slipping out of a balloon. Food tasted like nothing. Even water tasted heavy. Sometimes I would lie in bed for hours, my stomach hurting because I was hungry, but I couldn't bring myself to eat. Eating felt useless. Living felt useless. I just wanted to disappear into the walls.

Then came the day I was supposed to start my senior year of high school. A part of me thought maybe it would feel like a new beginning. Maybe I would get to breathe in a new place. But no. My mom had decided that the siblings, the ones who reminded me of my pain, were going to the same school too.

When I heard that, it felt like the ground disappeared from under my feet. How could she do that? Didn't she know how much it already hurt to live in the same house? Didn't she see how hard it was for me to even stay in the living room when they were around? And now she was putting them in the same school? The one place where I thought I could maybe breathe? I felt trapped everywhere. Home. School. My mind. My body. Everywhere.

The first day of senior year, I sat at my desk and I felt everyone around me moving, laughing, whispering, starting fresh. And I felt heavy. I didn't belong. And worse, I had to see them in the same halls, in the same uniforms, like shadows I couldn't escape. They blended with everything like they had always belonged, while I felt like a stranger in my own skin. I kept asking myself why. Why me? Why always me?

And then, the worst part came one night when I overheard my mom. She was on the phone with a friend, talking in that voice adults use when they think the kids are asleep. But I was awake. I always seemed to be awake. My ears caught her words and they sank like knives.

She said, "At least I have her. At least she is proof. She is evidence that I am not blind, that I can have my own children."

Evidence. Proof. Not daughter. Not love. Evidence.

I froze. I couldn't breathe. My heart felt like it cracked in a way I had never felt before. All this time, I thought maybe she brought me here because she wanted me. Because she loved me. Because she wanted to protect me from the pain I had gone through. But no. I was just proof. A living, breathing example to show other people that she wasn't broken. I was something she used to prove a point.

I sat in my room that night with my pillow over my face so I wouldn't scream out loud. I cried silently, tears soaking everything. My chest hurt so bad I thought maybe it would break open. That was the moment I felt the most unwanted in my whole life. More than when my dad disappeared. More than when I was assaulted. More than when everyone told me to just "get over it." This was my own mother. The one person I thought would never see me as anything less than her child. And she had reduced me to nothing but evidence.... I had never felt so worthless in my entire existence

Now I figured out the answer to my thoughts... If I was a mistake why didn't she get rid of me? Why didn't she leave me with my grandparents? Why did she want to see her "mistake" around her? Turns out my hope that she really wanted me and at least one parent to wanted me was just me being delusional... She didn't want me... No one did

More Chapters