Forget Me Not

This isn't your average bedtime story. This isn't make believe. This isn't a Disney movie, where everything turns out to be rainbows and smiles in the end. Life isn't a fairytale, and she was far from being a princess. She hardly laughed, and usually cried. Sometimes she wished that she could just die. A love so simple, so very deserved, was all that she had asked for, yet it was too much for the world to give her. How does one recover after receiving one heartbreak after another, year after year? The thing is, you don't.

Once upon a time, there lived a girl named Aubrey. She was once young and full of life. She was once a very lively and forgiving girl, and she was strong. Oh so very strong. It was like nothing could ever bring her down. From the stress of high school, to the pain of a drug addicted, abusive, narcissistic father, she still managed to keep her head held high and a smile upon her face. From the outside, nothing seemed wrong, but on the inside she was drowning in her own tears.

Everyday she struggled to make herself go home. Afraid of what she would find that day: a beaten and bloody mother trying to clean up the evidence of domestic abuse? A drunkenly enraged and lustful father, whose eyes were as cold and empty as his heart? Every second was like a ticking time bomb. When would it finally explode?

Her mother never realized the damage she was doing to her child as she stayed with her husband through the not only physical, but mental abuse. I don't think she realized that her daughter was wearing her wedding bands around her neck. I don't think she realized that whenever her daughter tried to rub the quiet, her screams were quickly silenced from a swift punch to the jaw. She never noticed when the life left from Aubrey's eyes, or when her tears became as frequent as breathing. No, I don't think she realized that she was participating in the internal murder of her precious baby girl, all because of the "love" she had for the man who beat her everyday.

Aubrey learned how to hide her bruises from people at school. Long sleeves and jeans were worn all year round, and when the heat was unbearable, cover up was her best friend. In a house where the abuse was as natural eating, Aubrey still managed to keep secrets. Deep dark secrets. Secrets that a mother who had paid attention to the man she let her child call a father should have, and would have, noticed. Fore it wasn't just the physical and mental abuse that Aubrey was suffering from. No. It went far deeper than that. What Aubrey's mother didn't know was that her daughter, by age seventeen, had already had three abortions, each unborn child belonging to her so called father.

There is only so much a seventeen-year-old girl can take, before she loses herself completely. When the only "man", though he was cruel and twisted, even though he beat you and didn't care about you in a way a father should, when HE walked out of her life, is when she broke down completely. She never let anyone get close to her; in fact she shut them out before they even knew she existed. She put up an unbreakable defense around herself. Her father, the one man who was supposed to love her, had left without so much as a note goodbye. If her own father couldn't love her, then who could?

The abuse, the beatings, the swearing and the lashing out; it was all her fault. She had brought in on herself. He did it because she was a lousy daughter, or so she believed. She went on believing this as she continued to grow up. Her mother began to engage in prostitution. Her own mother even paid men to come and rape her. 'This is what I deserve' she thought to herself each night as she cried herself to sleep. 'This is all I shall ever be.' The pain became so great that Aubrey decided to stop existing to the outside world completely. It began with dropping out of school. The school would call; she didn't pick up. Her friends would drop by, and she didn't answer the door. After a while the calls and visits became less and less frequent, until they didn't come at all. Aubrey left her house once a month, and that was only to get something to eat. She kept her head down and avoided all eye contact. She was nothing but a fading shadow in the back of people's minds.

As the world forgot about Aubrey's existence, so did her mother. She had moved out of the box they had once called an apartment, and went onto the streets. Now a heroin addicted prostitute, she rarely spared a moments thought on her daughter, and so Aubrey went on living; invisible. She was running low on food and decided to make her one-day outside the house a month trip to the market. Only, this trip was different from all the others. As she was walking, head down, a man grabbed her arm. A man that, never before in her life, has Aubrey seen. The normal thing to do would have been to scream, to pull away, but as he held onto her arm, something weird began to happen to her. It was as if his eyes could see right down to her soul. This stranger held onto her for a total of five second, just staring into her eyes, and then let go and walked away as if nothing had ever happened.

Maybe it was his screaming silver-blue eyes and his olive complexion. Maybe it was the shock her body got at the feeling of another humans interaction without it being a penis or a fist. Whatever it was, Aubrey couldn't stop thinking about it. She craved more. She needed to see him again. She needed him to look at her again. To grab her arm. And so she went from invisible, to the girl who stood outside the market everyday waiting for a stranger.

Eventually, she did see him again. It was about 2 weeks later that he appeared. When he saw her, he smiled and approached her casually. His name was Brett. He was twenty-seven, just two years older than Aubrey. Eventually they began to date, and for the first time in a very long time, she was happy. What was it about this man that made her feel so safe? So secure? Whatever it was, she didn't want it to ever end. But like everything else, all good things come to an end eventually. Aubrey and Brett had been dating for about eight months, when Brett was accidentally killed in a drive-by shooting.

The car had come out of nowhere. They were walking down the street when a group of thugs walked passed them. There was a loud 'SCREECH!' followed by three deafening gunshots. It was as if time had slowed down. One moment Aubrey was smiling, holding the hand of man she dreamed of spending all eternity with, and the next she was crying as he died in her arms. It was devastating. Three shots to the chest ended his life. Aubrey sat one the sidewalk, Brett's head on her lap, as the blood pooled endlessly onto her plaid skirt, and cried until an ambulance had come and take his body away. And as they drove away with her love, something inside of her finally snapped.

Aubrey, heartbroken, angry, and vengeful, made it her mission to track down her mother. She found her in a nearby alley; half naked and fixing up a new dosage of heroin for herself. Aubrey stormed up to her and slapped the needle from the woman. Then she held her dirty face into her hands and stared into the woman's eyes. "What do you want?' her mother hissed.

"Who am I?" asked Aubrey. "Do you have ANY idea as to who I could be?"

Her mother peered into her eyes. Searching for some sort of a clue as to the identity of the woman who was keeping her from her drug. "No, I don't" she hissed nastily. "Now leave me!" She pulled her face away and crawled in search of the syringe that had been smacked away from her.

Aubrey stood there in the darkness silent. She watched the woman she had once called a mother look for the one thing that was important to her. Heroin. "You." she said slowly. "You forgot the face of me? Your own daughter? Your flesh and blood? You failed to protect me, a scared and defenseless little girl, and then you have the nerve to forget me?" Aubrey smiled a wicked smile. The kind of smile that only those with a deep hatred could produce, and snickered. "Well you wont ever forget my face again." With that being said, she carved her face onto the back of her mother's eye lids with a broken glass bottle laying by a dumpster, killing her in the process. Then she decided to end her own pain.

It was a pain that she had been carrying for the past twenty-five years. The pain of unfelt love. She walked slowly down the empty streets, blood on her hands and skirt. She wasn't walking for long, when she found herself at the base of a bridge. She began to climb, and when she reached the top, she jumped. As she fell, she smiled as the wind wrapped itself around her body. And as she hit the water and was engulfed by a deadly wave, she smiled and thought to herself: "This is what freedom feels like".