I'm seeing the two boys that kept me from hurting myself and others around me in January, and it means so much to me *legit crying* Update: I didn't get to see them. My mom didn't buy the tickets. I should've known she was drunk when she told me.
Trigger Warning: Abuse, alcoholism, self harm, suicide, and cancer mentions (you can skip this chapter if you want, it's basically Ashley's backstory. The only thing you'll miss is that Ashley is going to stay at Tyler's house)
Saturday (8:30 pm)
Tyler let me stay at his place after we left Josh's. I couldn't go back home, not yet, and Tyler didn't want me to go back and have to face my half-assed mother, who would probably be too drunk to notice that I was there in the first place.
"Can I rant?" I asked in a meek, shallow voice.
"Ashley, baby. I don't see why not. I'll listen to every word, I promise." He held out his pinkie as I chuckled at his childish ways.
"My dad died when I was ten, he had brain cancer. I-" I choked on my words. It was like when you let a piercing close up, and then try to get the piercing back in. You really want it to go through, but you just can't seem to get it to come through.
"I was really close to him. I did everything with him. He wasn't at home a lot though, he had to work all day because my mother refused to find a job. They were going to get divorced, but my dad didn't want to hurt me. And plus, he died before it could actually happen." I took a deep breath.
"After that, she came home pretty much every night with a new man in her bed. It was as if dad was never there to her. So, I turned to hurting myself. My mom didn't care. I even tried- tried to kill myself. I was at a my moms ex-boyfriends house, and I found a whole bottle of pills. I swallowed them all." A tear streamed down my cheek.
"Luckily, the man was really caring, he didn't deserve my mom. He found me in the bathroom unconscious and saved my life." The car swerved as we almost hit a pothole.
"Sorry." Tyler said.
"I was in the hospital for a while. I still was hurting myself. My mom would beat me after that. She called me an ungrateful little bitch. She constantly reminded me that I was a crybaby, and that people had it worse than me so I should be thankful for what I have."
"Oh no, that's not- she shouldn't do that. Have you ever called the police?"
"Do you know what will happen if I do that?" I exploded, I didn't mean to be rude, but I was pretty sensitive at the moment. "When she gets out of jail, she'd beat my brain out!"
"S-sorry." Tyler apologized, a tone of hurt in his already quiet voice.
"I'm sorry, I didn't mean to blow up like that."
"Anyway," I continued. "I um, I stopped eating. I looked in the mirror everyday and told myself I was pretty. But, I didn't listen to myself. You can tell someone something, but it won't mean anything to them unless they actually listen to what you're saying."
"So then, I smashed every fucking mirror in the house. I looked just like my dad, and it fucking killed me to look in the mirror and see him. And what hurt even worse was that I didn't like how I looked. I thought I was ugly. And I felt that, in some sort of way, I was calling my dad ugly, too."
"I'm glad you agreed to stay with me, Ashley. You can stay as long as you want to. Your mom can't track you down, she doesn't know where I live." We drove the rest of the way to Tyler's house, the only noise being the occasional sniffle from the both of us.
