Emmy
☽ 𝓁𝑜𝓈𝒾𝓃𝑔 𝓂𝓎 𝓂𝒾𝓃𝒹 ☾
When Grace was born, her life had been picture perfect. The kind where you snap a photo of all the memories being made every day and hang them up on your fridge for passers-by to stop and admire. Her parents were in love. Soulmates, if you will. They completed each other like a jagged Ying and Yang holding onto the life that they hadn't chosen for themselves. Who does, after all? Who has a life full of things that they wished would be and it was, like your very fate is within your own shaking hands? We all have a life that is handed to us, but it is never really ours. Is it? We didn't ask for it but it was given. It was molded and shaped before we had the words to fall from our mouths like bowling balls in an abandoned house, vacant of the very lives that created us and birthed us into this realm of life where we are told what to do, say, think, and believe.
When Grace was four the photos were removed from the fridge. Even the one where she was dressed up as a pumpkin on Halloween toting around a pillowcase full of sweet candies that could never make her life a sweet paradise. She watched with big green eyes as her mother left from the same door they walked through on grocery days. She watched as her father ran outside barefoot on the cruelly cold gravel driveway, trying to hang onto the one thing that drove him mad but still made him sane enough to function. She watched as her father punched a hole in the wall just left of the white painted door even as she scurried underneath the cherrywood coffee table, unsure of what was to come after watching her life crumble in mere precious moments, flipping her upside down in her underdeveloped brain.
When Grace was nine she had learned two very important skills to keep her safe in her roller-coaster life that she liked to call tragedy. The first was she had discovered her love for the paste-like liquid that came in all hues and shades; Paint. Her frail fingers said what her mouth was incapable of, what her mind couldn't wrap itself around like a red bow on a present on Christmas morning. The second thing that Grace had learned not as a privilege but as means of survival; Driving. She would sit in the too large driver's seat of her father's dented and scratched pickup truck. She remembered thinking it was a perfect replica of the man that owned it. She held her head high as if she didn't have a crippling fear that made her knuckles turn white as they gripped onto the steering wheel, praying she had control over just this one thing. Her father always sat in the passenger's seat, slumped over and covered in vomit from hours spent at the local bar, drowning himself in a poison that wasn't strong enough to make him forget what had walked out that door when Grace was four.
On the day Grace had turned sixteen she had been slammed into the backseat of a car that was bought by a young man's parent, a gift that now contained nothing but horror. Her clothes had been torn from her body like thinly sliced paper that had been wadded up and thrown away. Her body had been viewed as that same scrap of torn paper by a lineman from her school's football team. He was an academically smart athlete that had promised a naive girl of a birthday surprise, but he forgot to mention that he wasn't giving something, but rather, taking. He took her voice that night, along with her self-esteem and her hope of ever becoming remotely intimate with any poor man that decided to spend his life with such a broken girl, both physically and emotionally. He had stolen the sliver of hope in humanity that she had buried deep within the walls of her beating heart since she was four.
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