A PAST TO FORGET ✓

Chapter XV

(edited )

~~"I grew afraid, and went inside my head.~~

—Henry Cole, 'Dandelions.'  From Nothing to Declare.

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-The year 2003. Flashback whereas Elijah is aged 17.

Towson, Maryland.

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A seventeen-year-old boy strides through the city after school. His halfway shredded backpack dangling off his less-built shoulders. His steps are menacing and taunting to turn back and just accept this Fate. A vest strapped tight to the young boy's fit and tall frame. His eyes were foreign, lost, and broken like a vase that had been dropped too many times.

This time, the beautiful vase broke, and a flower blossomed within.

That was the unappreciated courage, his immense courage to do something that frightened him his whole life, his monumental strength in the face of pain and grief.

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I didn't report my father to the police even though he deserved life behind bars. I didn't injure him even though he almost beat me to death. I hadn't stabbed him as he stabbed me. Ladies and Gentlemen,

I ran away.

I escaped hell. I escaped the house that was never home to me. The escape wasn't planned, as you should know. I never took a second thought when I decided I wanted to take the effort after school and dash away with my uniform still on, away from that life I despised oh so greatly.

Someone saved me when I was roaming anonymously through the streets of the state I lived in since I was born. The thing was, I didn't have a place to sleep. The money tucked away inside my pocket was a trashy bill of Five Dollars. Snow was falling from the sky, being the late winter season. No shelter could hide me from the cold, no hood that could cover me from the splatters of rain that evicted from the Sky.

Nothing at all.

I sighed, accepting the fact that this was my cause. I let this happen. I ran away with no outline or plan in my mind. It, of course, didn't mean that it was for nothing. Running away, escaping from a man who abused me for my whole life, and maybe more was not something that was taken so lightly in this society. That I found out and discovered when they sent me to a Private School, for first, there were no black bruises scattered along those youthful faces unlike mine. No one held sorrowful, painful expressions. Everyone was happy, if not content with their life.

I wasn't.

The abuse was normal, domestic violence, or whatever it was named upon, it seemed as though it was normal and not abstract or out of the ordinary.

Their saying went by like this. 

'You have an incredible house with a roof over your head and food served in the morning, and at night. You are lucky. Don't you dare be selfish?' My mother once told me with her thin, frail hands running through my thick, black Smokey hair. 

Her fingers danced through the coats and layers, sometimes curling them with her index finger and for some reason, at that moment. It was the only time and scenery whereas I felt content,