Twenty Four Seven || Adam Park

forty three

When I opened my eyes, I felt like I could see nothing but a haze of greys and blacks. I blinked my eyes a few times, confused to as why I couldn't see in color, but them my brain recognized something like this happening before... It was just like the nightmare I had with my parents... only this time, I woke up in my own bed in my grandmother's house.

I was hesitant to get out of bed but it felt like my body wasn't listening to me and I couldn't stop myself from moving. My feet hung off the side of my bed as I looked around the room. My stomach hurt a lot and the more I started to move, the more I realized that my entire body hurt and I didn't know why. When I finally stood up from sitting on the edge of the bed, I fell right to my knees. It felt like I had forgotten how to walk and when I fell on my knees, I could have screamed so loudly because it honestly just felt like I had shattered them from falling.

I winched as I reached back over to the bed to help me stand back up. Everything hurt to move but I managed to get back to my feet and use the bed to get some balance. I needed to look in a mirror – everything hurt so I had to figure out exactly what was going on here. I had to get out of this nightmare – but that wasn't going to happen until it was fully played out. I couldn't pull myself out of it even though I was fully aware that this was a nightmare.

I used pieces of furniture to hold my balance as I walked from my room to the bathroom. I searched for the light switch on the wall in the bathroom and flipped it upwards when I finally found it. I groaned in pain when I scooted over to the mirror and looked at myself. My face had looked terrible. Both my eyes were swollen and bright purple. I had a large cut across my face that was stitched together and a there was a bandage wrapped around my ear. My lower lip was busted and there was a scab over the area. What had happened to me? I had not the least bit of clue. I don't think I wanted to know because this was a dream... This was a dream, right?

I couldn't handle looking in the mirror anymore. My full intentions were to go back to my room and wait this dream out, but instead my feet took me down the stairs and I don't know why they did that because the moment I showed my face at the bottom of the stairs, my grandmother appeared and started yelling at me. I could only half hear what she was saying, but I could hear enough to know that she was calling me every name she could think of. She was telling me how I was the worst person in the world and how she hated me... how she hated me for killing her son... for becoming this burden she didn't want.

She didn't leave anything out. She made sure to tell me how much of a terrible granddaughter I was – how much of a delinquent I had always been. How much everyone hated me... how Adam just took pity on me... how all my friends really just made fun of me. Everything she could have said to hurt me, she said. I couldn't move from the spot I was standing in – it was like my feed had been glued there and all I kept telling myself as the tears ran down my face was that I needed to wake up. I just wanted to wake up so badly and get out of this nightmare but it wouldn't go away.

After my grandmother's yelling came the hitting... and every bit of it felt real. Every slap, every punch, every kick... every single blow felt entirely real and it left me sobbing on the floor at the bottom of the stairs. Then again, it truly was like every other day in that house... this is how she had always treated me since I had been forced to move in with her... but what really hurt the most, was when the police showed up in the nightmare and stood over top of me laughing. They laughed right in my face and told me I deserved every second of what she had just done to me. They laughed... and laughed... while I laid their crying and wishing that I could just have it all end.

I shut my eyes and told myself that it would be over soon... but it felt like hours. Hours. Hours that left not only me in a vulnerable state, but my body as well... It felt like it kept happening over and over again. I tried to hard to wake up... I did everything that I could think of, but it wasn't quite over yet... When I opened my eyes, thinking maybe it was over with... I was greeted with my parents standing with my grandmother... laughing just like the police had been... telling me that it was all my fault. Telling me that I had created this mess. Telling me that I would end up just like them and that I should just make it happen sooner rather than later... That it was never going to end unless I ended it...