Steal My Pain Away

5.

a/n: so like I'm gonna only make the therapy chapters in third person, everything else will be in millie's point of view unless otherwise noted.

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The dream is more real than anything I've felt in a long time. It was more like a series of multiple flashbacks, really. Flashbacks of the worst moments of my life.

"What do you mean Daddy isn't coming home?" I ask my mom, confused as to what was happening. People had been crying all day, coming over and giving me sympathetic eyes. 'I'm so sorry, Millie is so young too,' they'd say, and rub their hands through my short hair as if I liked it.

"Daddy isn't here anymore, baby," my mom cried to me, and I didn't like seeing her cry, so I pulled her into my arms.

And then the scene changes to a couple years later.

"Where are you going Mama?" I ask, pulling on my mom's short dress. She wasn't walking straight and I knew something was wrong with her, I just didn't know what.

"I'm going out with a guy. Don't worry, everything will be okay soon."

"Is he my new Daddy?" I ask quietly, my small innocent eyes meeting her bloodshot sad ones.

"Let's hope so baby."

And then another year after that.

"Grandma, I think something's wrong with mommy," I speak into the phone calmly. I'd gotten used to my mom being weak and crying, but she wasn't moving. I was seven now, and her boyfriend at the time had left, and Mom wasn't happy about it.

"What do you mean, Millie?" she asks me anxiously.

"I think she took too much of her sad medicine."

I watch the ambulance take my mom away later that night, and a cop talks to me like a was a baby. He didn't know that I was able of speaking like a grown up, and that I knew how to make my mom feel better than they ever could. "Does your mom leave you at home a lot?" the big scary man asked me, and if I knew better I would have lied to him and said no.

But I said yes, which leads to another year ahead, living with my grandma, and things were kind of normal for once in my life. My grandma would make me meals instead of microwave dinners, and she would drive me to school and come on field trips and she wouldn't bring home strange men or leave me home alone.

I would still see my mom on the weekends, and it was almost normal again. She wasn't crying as often, and she was nicer than before.

But one weekend, we were driving to the store, and a cop pulled her over, and she started crying again. I kept asking her "Why are you crying mom?" over and over, but she kept crying until the cop told her that she was driving on a suspended license and had false license plates, whatever that meant.

I didn't see my mom again until I was 16 and by then I had grown up a lot. Of course, she already had a new boyfriend, and she made the same promises to me. "Don't worry, Millie. Steve says he's gonna take care of us, we're going to get you back."

And for the first time, the dreams of my mom started becoming nightmares. I didn't want her in my life anymore.

"Josh, I don't know. It makes me feel so heartless. I don't want her in my life anymore, what's wrong with me? I'm supposed to love her," I talk quietly to the boy I was sitting with. He had a pickup truck and was driving me back from a football game.

I lost my virginity that night.

And the next day I broke up with him. That's when I knew my mom had messed me up, bad. I would go through boy after boy, trying to feel something, and nothing ever stayed.