My childhood consists of dark things that people wouldn't want to know about. 

Maybe an angst novel writer 

but I can't think of anyone else. 

 

I grew up believeing I had disorders I never had. 

One thing, after the other, changed my life to come where I had now, 

but who knows which outcome would have been better. 

 

The first disorder I was told I had was adjustment disorder. 

My parents who had met through university were as happy as can be. 

I was their first child, born in 1993 and in the spring of 1997, when my mother had finally recuperated 

health (after giving birth to me) enough to have a second child, she was blessed, or could it have been a curse, with a second child. 

They had wanted to name her Donna. 

On her fifth month of pregnancy, I noticed my mother become upset often. 

She cried everyday for a week, and I never once saw my father come home to comfort her. 

Then when I left the house one day to play out in the garden, mother had chased after me to ask me to wear a coat. 

She slipped and fell on the wet doorstep. 

She was crying in pain for what I remember being a few seconds, then she had passed out cold on the floor. 

I yelled and screamed and neighbors called the ambulance. 

 

The neighbors took care of me that day while I cried and cried. I didn't have anything to eat 

because I was scared to death about what had happened, and worried to death about my mother. 

The next day my father came home and I was taken home. 

I asked him all the questions about what had happened to mother and if she was okay, If he had seen her in the hospital and how Donna was. If she was okay. 

My father just took out a white stick and started to light it with a flame. The box that contained 15 more read "Marlboro" 

 

After what felt like a week or two, my mother came home. I cried so much because I hadn't known if she was alive the whole time. 

She was pale white, thinner than I had ever seen her body be, and her eyes were bloodshot. 

And I noticed her whole body seemed different overall. 

That night my father got drunk and I watched on the couch as he walked into the bedroom my mother was in with his fist clenched tightly. 

He yelled at her, and I remember things such as 

"did it on purpose", 

"knew I was cheating", 

"split up, Now." 

 

The next morning I woke up and nobody was home. 

 

---------

 

A few years later, when I was 6, my father brought a woman home. 

The next morning, they told me they would marry. That they were in love. That 

I had no say in this. 

 

After the marriage things weren't that different compared to the last 2 years. 

Father went out for most of the day as usual, and I heard them come home when it was late at night. 

 

The lady who married my father never really talked to me. So I tried to start up conversation sometimes. Only in the mornings. Because at lunch she never stayed home, and at night she smelt dangerous. 

Whenever I said something, she would ignore me or yell at me. 

Then one day, she came up to me with a bag of lollies and asked me about my 'father's old wife' 

when I told her some of the details, such as how she got a second baby but she disappeared one day, 

the woman muttered '' in the middle of her smoke. 

Infuriated, I picked up the lollies she had brought and threw them at her, and I yelled 

"She's not! You don't know her!" 

and the woman's eyes rounded in suprise.