I Never Knew

I never knew my life was not ordinary, grew up in a big house in one of the most popular areas of our town. My mother worked 80 hours a week, my grandmother works 40, my grandfather worked every Sunday as he was our towns preacher. I never knew my father, but I didn’t know that wasn’t normal.

As I started to get older I realized how different my life was from everybody else, others would speak of their mothers baking cookies for their lunchbox and mine would pop pills in the kitchen and I’d find myself on free lunch at school because mine was never packed ans I was left with no money. Others would speak about visiting their grandparents on the weekends and I would see mine every day, including my grandfather dying on his hospice bed after he had been diagnosed with pharyngeal cancer when I was five years old. I would hear other children talk about their fathers, how they’d take them fishing and I didn’t even know what a pole looked like; but I knew what a meth pipe looked like. I could name almost every drug by the age of 12, fentanyl, Dilaudid, oxycodone, Xanax, Ativan, Klonopin,. I can tell you the colors and shapes, it was almost like how kindergartners learn their shapes. Square goes in square, triangle goes to triangle. Except mine was blue pill equals happy and white pill equals high. I never did drugs a day in my life but I knew everything about them. I watched the horrors unfold for the people who did them, I learned how to hold a roach by the time I was eight, he said to me:put two penniesin between your fingers so you don’t burn your pretty little hands. He meant well, most of the men in these homes that my mother drug me to never had ill intent, believe it or not most of them tried to shield me from the things that transpired behind the curtains between the rooms with movies like Romeo and Juliet, a man falls dead in the bathroom and I’m in another room quaating Shakespeare. I learnt how to drive at the age of nine because my mother got high at every occasion she could grasp up a few dollar bills to buy one pill. One pill, six hours, I grew up too fast. I remember there were times when I was a teenager and I had to blend in more; I start picking up a cigarette to smoke, you didn’t want to look too inconspicuous. There were some nights I would sit on the porch with my lit cigarette listen to the owls at night. Their sounds gave me a sense of peace meanwhile other arguments in the house over who drank the last bottle of liquor or finished the last line of Coke. I found myself drowning into the sound of the night. One evening a man who could out drink any man in the world, 50 beers a day post PTSD from being a sniper in the military. He didn’t talk to people much, but he loves to tell me stories of why he became the way that he was, why he drink to forget. I started looking at this man as a father figure because he had to come closer than my actual father had. I’ll never forget and a game of poker he didn’t play for drugs this time, he played for a necklace for me. A golden cross I still have to this day, because it reminds me that people still do have a soul no matter their addiction or affliction. They are still in there somewhere. I never knew my life was not ordinary.