I believe, in life, everyone is blessed with one miracle. Whether it be as simple as just having a mostly normal life, or in my case, having some type of gift. For me, my gift is being able to write. In the past three years, writing has become my future and everything I live for. See, I don’t have a normal family. My life is like a nonstop abstract piece of art.

For as long as I’ve had little files of memory in my child-like brain, I’ve heard the screaming matches of whose voice could become the most hollow. Over the years I’ve watched my parents’ ‘I love you’s turn slowly forced until eventually there wasn’t love at all and everyone stopped pretending like there was. My dad is selfish, like he’s always been. It’s been my mom I’ve seen a major change occur in. The women who smiled and never yelled, soon wore a melting mask that was beginning to show her resent. I can’t positively say it was resent towards me, even though I’ve always had a feeling it was since I’m the reason she married my father. She was young and I was their love child that she didn’t want to grow up without a father. I don’t think, at the time when she made this decision, she knew exactly what she was in for.

I don’t think she realized how much the bottom of several empty beer bottles, at a time, would affect her life. There’s always been so much baggage that came along with my father. The drinking, the smoking, a military career that soon deteriorated him into a monster that hid behind mountains of pills for PTSD, paranoia, and anxiety amongst other things. It took over our lives and their marriage. It got to a point where they were in some type of battle and she just gave up. She let him win every fight because I guess to her it was easier than having to go in circles with a guy so drunk he got her name tattooed on his arm during a family vacation.

I remember waking up to different kinds of screams. These were screams of some kind of psychotic break and as I appeared in their room I was horrified to find my drunken dad calling my mom profane names as she attempted to get ready for work. I recall this specific look in his eyes. A certain twinge you only see in horror movies right before the antagonist kills someone. It was a look of being lost. My dad was gone and now we were left praying this monster, this unholy demon, would spare us. Although he didn’t kill us, we still were not to be spared. Because I still ended up in the driveway dry-heaving and crying without tears. She still ended up with things being thrown at her, from fans and computers to words sharper than knives. We both ended up mentally unfixable.

We weren’t sparred because we both were hurt and I don’t think either of us ever got the mental picture of the gone look in his eyes out of our heads. To this day, I still have flashes of that look causes chills under my skin, or intense nightmares. To this day I can still vividly describe how I felt and the rhythm of my heart beat. I still go to therapy and I’m still not who I was, nor will I ever be.

Though time does heal, so do some miracles. I thank the higher power above each and every day for my miraculous gift of writing. I know that without it I probably wouldn’t still be here. So yeah, some people get the luxury of having a normal life and a normal family, but I’ve been granted the gift in seeing beauty even in the most painstaking parts of life.