Ill Will

It was close to 2:00am when I finally heard the door open and her stumbling in, shushing someone. I sigh softly and turn over on the couch, covering my ears from the soft moaning coming from the room. She was out almost every night, drinking, leaving me at home in the small one-bedroom apartment complex, and it was a lucky draw to see if she came home drunkenly violent or with someone. I understood it was her way of dealing with everything going on, but it was disgusting how she could do that with her own son at home any normal mother would just grieve and cry for a while and eventually get over it, but not her. She just brings shame to my father's name; all the neighbours talk about it.

Two years earlier my sister, who was older than me, was walking me along the beach, helping me pick out sea shells; we walked past the rock pools and she stood at the edge of the rocks, overlooking the ocean. She smiled back at me and dived in, I laughed and sat at the edge watching as she swam around. The waves started getting bigger and splashing against the rocks, spraying me with water. I was momentarily blinded by the salt water in my eyes that I lost sight of her and could only hear she screams before they were muffled out by the deafening roar of the ocean hitting against the rocks. I didn't fully comprehend what was happening and tried looking for her while the sea battled on. I screamed her name over the waves and ran across the rocks trying to find her. I sat down after what seemed like hours of cried, I see my mother walking towards me, a look of confusion on her face as she tries to find her daughter.

After months of grieving together, my mother started to become distant from me. Pulling away, not talking to me; it was almost as though she couldn't even bear to look at me. I felt so guilty as though my sister's death was my fault, and the way my mother was acting reinforced the idea that I killed her. The she just stopped looking after me, not feeding me, clothing me. She was bearing looking after herself, she didn't shower anymore, she didn't brush her hair or her teeth. She was falling apart. That's when the drinking, partying and sex started. It was as though she was trying to drown herself in these things, trying to dissociate from herself and her responsibilities. It was terrible how she could just turn her back on me, on herself, on her job, her responsibilities. A child shouldn't have to look have to look after themselves as young as 7.

In my grief I started going to church, I had to find some hard ground to hold onto in the craziness of my life. The church gave me a stable family and something to believe in that wasn't just on earth, but a higher being that would look after me; who would be a father figure for me. They showed me that everything my mother was doing was against God, she was a sinner and brought great problems into my household with her issues.

As I grew older, I became more reliant on the church, and my mother became less my mother and more some woman I no longer recognised. She became more and more reliant on alcohol and sex I barely ever saw her at home. She disappears in the morning and only returns home. She was no longer the loving mother I could go to for everything, as I used to when I was little. I didn't have another sibling I could talk to when I had issues and the church only helped with some of my problems as I was still labelled as a "Bastard" from my mother's promiscuousness with my father, whom I never got to meet.

The delusion that everything would be fine if I just waited it out until I could move out only lasted so long. I tried for jobs all over the country to try and escape from my mother's reputation. But everyone turned me down, until I found a job further away from my mother than I could have hoped for. Working for the countess Olivia as her steward, when I met her I saw she was beautiful, rich, fragrant and I fell in love with her. From then on, I dreamed about marrying her, the most beautiful girl in all of Illyria and although I knew it would never be true, it was still such a sweet thought that I kept in the back of my mind.

And although while working for Olivia I have had to deal with her uncle, Sir Toby Belch, whom is the most obnoxious, repugnant, distasteful man I have ever met. Waking the household up in the early hours of the morning with his drinking and obnoxious singing. I don't understand why Lady Olivia keeps him around, maybe for a male figure of sorts from her bloodline to be in the house as of her father's untimely death. In the end, I was glad I was out of that household. And in a household of beauty and integrity, where I belonged.