Care For Me Not, I'll Hurt You Too Much
Who?
You were just about ready to give up and attempt to sleep when something caught your eye. A familiar face walking down the driveway and into the house carrying a box made you take a double take. By the time your head finally turned back to look at the figure slinking its way into the house, he was already well behind the cover of the porch. Your heart rate increased for no reason and an automatic blush colored your cheeks at the moment you realized whose face it was you were hoping it wasn’t.
How can Fate choose this punishment? Your hands go shaky and you practically lean all the way out of your window, craning your neck just to see if your godforsaken assumptions were correct.
You only saw movers after that, carrying boxes back and forth into the house, at least you thought they were movers. There were no uniforms, there was just plain clothing. There were however, several teenage boys that seemed to have no relation at all. Maybe they were just hired help, trying to earn an extra buck to buy the new basket ball shoes. Yeah, you think, that’s all they are, just movers, hired help. You convince yourself that it was just a hallucination. You were hoping to whatever God it was that was out there that it was just a hallucination. A mere trick of the light, a mirage from your tired eyes is all you were praying it to be.
But no matter how much you tried to convince yourself that it was just a trick of the eyes, you couldn’t shake away that feeling that it wasn’t. You became nervous and began hanging out your window just to try and see anyone walking around in and out of the house. You saw several people carrying what looked like boxes passing through the house and in front of the windows, but the curtains shielded them from view and you weren’t able to tell who they were or what they looked like. You cursed yourself for your edginess as you lowered yourself back down and rested your chin onto your folded arms.
You wanted so badly to just forget you ever saw your hallucination of him and lay down to sleep, but you just needed to be sure that your recently acquired nightmare wasn’t about to come true.
You watched for hours as the teenaged boys carried more boxes and mattresses into the house. There were three of them total—mattresses—that came into the house. These boys must be hired help then. None of them seem to be related and all of them couldn’t be able to fit onto just those three mattresses, even if one of them was a queen sized. There seemed to be six of them total, along with two adults. You figured that the adult couple would take the queen sized mattress, so only two of these boys would really be their children.
From the brief glances you stole at them—well that which you were allowed—you couldn’t see any similarity between any of them and the parents. Your eyes grew tired and strained and the cold flowing through the window made your comforter seem oddly warm and inviting.
Your eyes lids grew heavy and you were just about to fall asleep against your window sill until a light came on right across the dividing space between your house and theirs. This action made you jump so much that you nearly hit your head on the sill above. You could feel your heartbeat racing and all the sleepiness left your eyes as you now crouched down lower into your room.
Idiot! Your window’s wide open! You reach up and attempt to pull down the frame of your painted window as quickly as possible, but right then, you see a head poke in and out of the room quickly.
They can’t see you. Your light’s off and theirs isn’t powerful enough to illuminate it all the way over here. This reassured you slightly, but you thought you recognized the figure that now pulled their head back out of the room.
You wait silently, like a mouse caught in the eyes of an owl, just waiting to be devoured at any moment. The tension you were building up made your already sore muscles ache, but you couldn’t move as long as that light was on and you might be able to actually see who it was that was moving in next door. The door opens slightly more than it had been before, a hand slowly reaches into the room and…the light goes out.
You fall apart internally at the struggle your muscles had to just keep still at the moment. The light going off eased your nerves slightly as you now stretched out of your strain to the sky, reaching your arms up over your head to ease the tension built up in your back. You pull the window down halfway, enough to block out the swamp lights from the streets below, but still enough to let the cool air flow through your room.
You lean back against the wall and sigh as you grip your pillow tighter to your chest and pull your feet up onto the edge of the bed. Your thoughts run away with you once again and memory lane surrounds you.
That room, the one where the light just came on and went off…that was her room.
You hadn’t seen it in ages. The pale walls, now blank, used to be filled with your elementary school drawings and her favorite pictures of her favorite bands, books, actors, and movies. She was always so creative with everything she did. Even her style of dress was different. You loved her so much. She was your best friend, your sister, your hero.
You cared so much for her and followed her everywhere. You wanted to be exactly like her and admired her so much while growing up. Even when you were too small to really be taken seriously by anyone, she took you everywhere and cherished your every word like gold. You still believe to this day that she had cared about you as much as you cared about her. Then why did she leave? You think.
Those pale walls, once filled with so much life held your deepest secrets within them and carried all of your joys, and eventually all of your turmoil like a large diary you never thought would be opened or read by anyone else. The thought of other people living in that house scared you. Didn’t they know the history of it? Didn’t they know what happened there and why no one else wanted it for so long?
You remember that one of those walls holds your name, engraved into it for what you thought was forever. Cee and Kay encircled in a large heart was carved into the north wall, just at the base, right above the wooden finish running around the edge. It seemed appropriate for the two of you to do it at the time, thinking that the two of you would be living in that town, in those same two houses for the rest of your lives. Who was to know that the latter phrase would come sooner rather than later for her?
After your father began hurting you, you ran away often, but never went farther or stayed farther away than the house right next door. You used to keep a box of crackers and a sleeping bag in her closet, just so that you would have a place to stay for the night before you had to go back and bear more of his burdens tomorrow morning. That became the only place that you were safe. That one room held all your secrets and joys before, and after your father hit you, it became the place that held all of your turmoil as well. It was your safe haven, the one place you could run to with all of your problems and it would be able to pull the wool of ignorance over your eyes. It shielded your from the pain of reality.
One time though, you couldn’t take anything. This was a long time ago, before you discovered your talent to tune the entire world out and escape to your elementary school drawings, and your green eyed boys. Your father hit you again, by this time you were already getting used to the pain being there constantly and the consistency of it made your body ready for whatever may come as soon as you walked through the door after school. But this time was different. This time your father said his first insults, his first accusations, and his first regrets of a better life he had before he ever had you. He told you his wishes of your death and how much he blamed you for how both your lives fell apart that day of the accident.
You ran as soon as you woke, not caring whether or not he was in the next room, or waiting in the hallway, or standing with a bat at the door, waiting for you to run into your demise while he was in his drunken stupor. You packed your back pack with two sets of clothes, pictures, and some other minor necessities that you believe you would need for wherever you were going. You got as far as the lawn before you turned and walked up to that house now becoming re-occupied next door. You crawled through the loose window in the kitchen and hauled yourself straight upstairs. There was nothing anywhere anymore, save for the fine layer of dust now lining the floors and carpets. You went to the room that was adjacent from yours, the room your window still faces to this day. You went to your real home, for what you believed to be the last time.
As soon as you opened the door, you saw the images of yourself and her, Ceana, drawing pictures, watching movies, divulging life secrets, telling scary stories, reading the latest comic book, and finally carving your names into the wall, to hold yourself into a concrete structure forever. You ran your fingers along the walls, until you came to the wall that held what remained of your innocence and dreams.
You screamed and shouted as loud as you could. You didn’t care at all if anyone heard. You didn’t care at all, he made you not be able to care at all. There was no one around anyway. You were so caught up in your own life that you didn’t notice how the south side of Faith Court became more and more deserted. It came to the point where you and Ceana’s house were the only two occupied. When you screamed, you remembered this and screamed louder. You slammed your fist into the wall until it bled, you kicked a hole into the back of the closet and tried to claw out your name from the wood. The last task seemed to be the hardest to do. Your hands were bloody, swollen and shaking so bad that you became so weak. The tears stained your face unashamedly and the salty taste stayed there for days, no matter how much you tried to wash it away under the hot water steaming out of the shower head.
As your nails scratched ineffectively over the carving, you rested your forehead against the wall and cried until there were no more tears in your eyes and your mouth was dry. The dizziness swept over and you felt like you had the first night your father hit you over the head with the base of the phone.
You have to deal love. It’s shit, but that’s how it’s supposed to be. The voice said so clearly in your head you could have sworn that you heard it in the room itself.
This scared you so much that if you had the strength then you would have got up and ran straight to the river to plunge yourself headfirst into the water from the height of the train bridge. Instead, you fell back onto the floor and stared at the ceiling. That’s what she told me the first time I felt like running away.
With that knowledge, you stayed there and passed out once again into your catatonic state of wandering. From then on you believed that the familiar pessimistic voice that was so unlike your own, was hers. Ceana Harker, the girl who left behind a pile of shit life.
How can Fate choose this punishment? Your hands go shaky and you practically lean all the way out of your window, craning your neck just to see if your godforsaken assumptions were correct.
You only saw movers after that, carrying boxes back and forth into the house, at least you thought they were movers. There were no uniforms, there was just plain clothing. There were however, several teenage boys that seemed to have no relation at all. Maybe they were just hired help, trying to earn an extra buck to buy the new basket ball shoes. Yeah, you think, that’s all they are, just movers, hired help. You convince yourself that it was just a hallucination. You were hoping to whatever God it was that was out there that it was just a hallucination. A mere trick of the light, a mirage from your tired eyes is all you were praying it to be.
But no matter how much you tried to convince yourself that it was just a trick of the eyes, you couldn’t shake away that feeling that it wasn’t. You became nervous and began hanging out your window just to try and see anyone walking around in and out of the house. You saw several people carrying what looked like boxes passing through the house and in front of the windows, but the curtains shielded them from view and you weren’t able to tell who they were or what they looked like. You cursed yourself for your edginess as you lowered yourself back down and rested your chin onto your folded arms.
You wanted so badly to just forget you ever saw your hallucination of him and lay down to sleep, but you just needed to be sure that your recently acquired nightmare wasn’t about to come true.
You watched for hours as the teenaged boys carried more boxes and mattresses into the house. There were three of them total—mattresses—that came into the house. These boys must be hired help then. None of them seem to be related and all of them couldn’t be able to fit onto just those three mattresses, even if one of them was a queen sized. There seemed to be six of them total, along with two adults. You figured that the adult couple would take the queen sized mattress, so only two of these boys would really be their children.
From the brief glances you stole at them—well that which you were allowed—you couldn’t see any similarity between any of them and the parents. Your eyes grew tired and strained and the cold flowing through the window made your comforter seem oddly warm and inviting.
Your eyes lids grew heavy and you were just about to fall asleep against your window sill until a light came on right across the dividing space between your house and theirs. This action made you jump so much that you nearly hit your head on the sill above. You could feel your heartbeat racing and all the sleepiness left your eyes as you now crouched down lower into your room.
Idiot! Your window’s wide open! You reach up and attempt to pull down the frame of your painted window as quickly as possible, but right then, you see a head poke in and out of the room quickly.
They can’t see you. Your light’s off and theirs isn’t powerful enough to illuminate it all the way over here. This reassured you slightly, but you thought you recognized the figure that now pulled their head back out of the room.
You wait silently, like a mouse caught in the eyes of an owl, just waiting to be devoured at any moment. The tension you were building up made your already sore muscles ache, but you couldn’t move as long as that light was on and you might be able to actually see who it was that was moving in next door. The door opens slightly more than it had been before, a hand slowly reaches into the room and…the light goes out.
You fall apart internally at the struggle your muscles had to just keep still at the moment. The light going off eased your nerves slightly as you now stretched out of your strain to the sky, reaching your arms up over your head to ease the tension built up in your back. You pull the window down halfway, enough to block out the swamp lights from the streets below, but still enough to let the cool air flow through your room.
You lean back against the wall and sigh as you grip your pillow tighter to your chest and pull your feet up onto the edge of the bed. Your thoughts run away with you once again and memory lane surrounds you.
That room, the one where the light just came on and went off…that was her room.
You hadn’t seen it in ages. The pale walls, now blank, used to be filled with your elementary school drawings and her favorite pictures of her favorite bands, books, actors, and movies. She was always so creative with everything she did. Even her style of dress was different. You loved her so much. She was your best friend, your sister, your hero.
You cared so much for her and followed her everywhere. You wanted to be exactly like her and admired her so much while growing up. Even when you were too small to really be taken seriously by anyone, she took you everywhere and cherished your every word like gold. You still believe to this day that she had cared about you as much as you cared about her. Then why did she leave? You think.
Those pale walls, once filled with so much life held your deepest secrets within them and carried all of your joys, and eventually all of your turmoil like a large diary you never thought would be opened or read by anyone else. The thought of other people living in that house scared you. Didn’t they know the history of it? Didn’t they know what happened there and why no one else wanted it for so long?
You remember that one of those walls holds your name, engraved into it for what you thought was forever. Cee and Kay encircled in a large heart was carved into the north wall, just at the base, right above the wooden finish running around the edge. It seemed appropriate for the two of you to do it at the time, thinking that the two of you would be living in that town, in those same two houses for the rest of your lives. Who was to know that the latter phrase would come sooner rather than later for her?
After your father began hurting you, you ran away often, but never went farther or stayed farther away than the house right next door. You used to keep a box of crackers and a sleeping bag in her closet, just so that you would have a place to stay for the night before you had to go back and bear more of his burdens tomorrow morning. That became the only place that you were safe. That one room held all your secrets and joys before, and after your father hit you, it became the place that held all of your turmoil as well. It was your safe haven, the one place you could run to with all of your problems and it would be able to pull the wool of ignorance over your eyes. It shielded your from the pain of reality.
One time though, you couldn’t take anything. This was a long time ago, before you discovered your talent to tune the entire world out and escape to your elementary school drawings, and your green eyed boys. Your father hit you again, by this time you were already getting used to the pain being there constantly and the consistency of it made your body ready for whatever may come as soon as you walked through the door after school. But this time was different. This time your father said his first insults, his first accusations, and his first regrets of a better life he had before he ever had you. He told you his wishes of your death and how much he blamed you for how both your lives fell apart that day of the accident.
You ran as soon as you woke, not caring whether or not he was in the next room, or waiting in the hallway, or standing with a bat at the door, waiting for you to run into your demise while he was in his drunken stupor. You packed your back pack with two sets of clothes, pictures, and some other minor necessities that you believe you would need for wherever you were going. You got as far as the lawn before you turned and walked up to that house now becoming re-occupied next door. You crawled through the loose window in the kitchen and hauled yourself straight upstairs. There was nothing anywhere anymore, save for the fine layer of dust now lining the floors and carpets. You went to the room that was adjacent from yours, the room your window still faces to this day. You went to your real home, for what you believed to be the last time.
As soon as you opened the door, you saw the images of yourself and her, Ceana, drawing pictures, watching movies, divulging life secrets, telling scary stories, reading the latest comic book, and finally carving your names into the wall, to hold yourself into a concrete structure forever. You ran your fingers along the walls, until you came to the wall that held what remained of your innocence and dreams.
You screamed and shouted as loud as you could. You didn’t care at all if anyone heard. You didn’t care at all, he made you not be able to care at all. There was no one around anyway. You were so caught up in your own life that you didn’t notice how the south side of Faith Court became more and more deserted. It came to the point where you and Ceana’s house were the only two occupied. When you screamed, you remembered this and screamed louder. You slammed your fist into the wall until it bled, you kicked a hole into the back of the closet and tried to claw out your name from the wood. The last task seemed to be the hardest to do. Your hands were bloody, swollen and shaking so bad that you became so weak. The tears stained your face unashamedly and the salty taste stayed there for days, no matter how much you tried to wash it away under the hot water steaming out of the shower head.
As your nails scratched ineffectively over the carving, you rested your forehead against the wall and cried until there were no more tears in your eyes and your mouth was dry. The dizziness swept over and you felt like you had the first night your father hit you over the head with the base of the phone.
You have to deal love. It’s shit, but that’s how it’s supposed to be. The voice said so clearly in your head you could have sworn that you heard it in the room itself.
This scared you so much that if you had the strength then you would have got up and ran straight to the river to plunge yourself headfirst into the water from the height of the train bridge. Instead, you fell back onto the floor and stared at the ceiling. That’s what she told me the first time I felt like running away.
With that knowledge, you stayed there and passed out once again into your catatonic state of wandering. From then on you believed that the familiar pessimistic voice that was so unlike your own, was hers. Ceana Harker, the girl who left behind a pile of shit life.