Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
THEO USED TO SEE the good in people from the richer side of the island, led into a false sense of security by fictitious lies of his mother throughout his childhood.
He'd believed every lie she'd thrown together about her friends, family and even just about herself. Theo loved his mother so much that he would've taken anything she'd said and ran with it, not even bothering to check if what she said was true. It took him some time to see passed her words, formulate his own opinions, and it had all started when she broke her promise.
"I would never leave you, Theo"
Lie. The blonde woman had spoken the same quote to him over and over again as he grew up, ruffling his hair softly as she did so. He should've seen it coming in the end, Sapphire Silver becoming more of a party goer and less of a mother towards the end of her life with them - she got offered a new job, saw a way out and bailed on the two people who needed her the most.
That morning when he had woke up to find all her things gone, was the morning he stopped believing the things she'd told him. Sapphire was merely a liar, the woman who may have taken care of him for a while but that wasn't his mother. That day, as the rain splashed against the window of his bedroom, the happiness within him faded behind its own clouds, a star drained of all of its life and left out to die.
There is that little inkling of gratefulness within him though, because without her leaving him he never would have grown so close with his father. Eric Silver was just like him in a way, Theo remembers the way he'd wallowed around the house for a few days with a glass of alcohol in his right hand and a cigar in the left. His hair grew out scruffily, beard overgrown and messy as he lost all ability to care for himself in that timespan. It was the saddest he'd ever seen the man, desperate even, as he tried to move on from his heart disintegrating into dust.
For a while there, Theo thought maybe he would lose his father to a broken heart, his ten year old mind not able to comprehend the way the man was acting. He wishes he could go back to that day and do the one thing he didn't do and that was hug him so tightly that he knew he was loved, because apparently his mother didn't tell him that enough.
Sometimes on birthdays, Theo would find his eyes straying towards the door and awaiting her arrival with an extravagant cake in her arms with bright colours splashed across its surface. His eleventh, twelfth and so on, all of them spent waiting for her to come home.
But at sixteen, he finally learnt his lesson. She wasn't coming back, so he just stopped hoping.
