Fear Itself

Arguing became a regular routine in my house over the next year. It wasn’t a daily thing, no. I wouldn’t go so far as to say we argued incessantly, but it certainly became more frequent than when I was younger. I had learned enough by fifteen to know that my life wasn’t normal, and what does any teenage girl want but to be normal, even if just for five minutes? We fought over the usual: leaving the house. I wanted nothing more than to get outside and feel the sun warming my skin. I wanted to feel the grass under my feet, and I wanted to hear the sounds of birds chirping from the yard, not just from my window. I don’t know what I couldn’t, even if safety was the concern: we had a large brick wall surrounding the home, and I highly doubted that anyone in this world existed that was over ten feet tall.

Things just weren’t adding up, and it was hard for me to grapple with my warring wants. Part of me wanted to keep this close relationship I had with my father; part of me wanted to break away and find my freedom away from the walls of our spacious but somehow suffocating mansion. I never thought it would feel small: as a child, I used to get lost in it. Now, I just felt like the walls were closing in on me, and it was becoming harder and harder to entertain myself for hours and hours each day. It didn’t help the fact that the older I got, the longer my father had stay at work, probably because of my curious (and nosy) nature and habit of sticking my nose everywhere it absolutely didn’t belong.

My father was not keen on this newfound sense of adventure, and he seemed rather intent on squashing the seeds before they could take root; it was too late. They already had. My mind had craved new experiences for years. I wanted something tangible, something I could touch with my hands and brush my fingertips against. I wanted more than just the flimsy pages of a textbook. I found recently that I enjoyed ripping pages out of them just as much as I enjoyed reading them. Any other time, I would have been flabbergasted and physically pained at the thought of tearing a page out of a book, one of my precious friends, but I was growing angry. I was furious, and I didn’t know what else to do about it.

I was too terrified to leave; that much I knew. As much as I told myself to go climb out the window and run away, I knew I couldn’t handle myself. My father was right. The world was no place for a girl like me, and I could tell by the way my fear crippled me whenever I cracked my window open. How could I ever survive in the real world if I was too afraid to go out there in the first place?

Half-way to my sixteenth birthday, I tried it again. This time, I was going to go through with it. I was going to get out. I packed my backpack with a few outfits and some other necessities. I had asked for a backpack one Christmas when I was younger; I have no idea why I wanted it, just that I thought it was cool. I strapped it on my back, and I pushed the window open. I was going to go this time. I settled myself on the window sill, and I tried to balance myself, preparing myself for my big escape. I braced my knees on the bottom of the opening; I saw my path: to the branch. I needed to just jump and get it over with. I took a deep breath, and I was about to throw myself from window when I felt something tug on my backpack and yank me back inside. A squeal escaped my mouth as my father pulled me back on the bed.

He stood above me, towering, looming over me. His blue eyes stared down in a piercing gaze, and I could bring myself to look at his face. “Thalia,” he said pointedly. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

“I…” I began, but I couldn’t find the words. Nothing was coming to mind, and I was drawing blanks, suddenly feeling ashamed, horrified, and guilty all at one. “N-nothing,” I stammered. “Nothing.”

“Really?” my father asked through a breathy laugh. “It looks to me like you were trying to climb out the window. Am I incorrect?”

I shook my head, still unable to look into my father’s eyes. Blinking, a few tears spilled down my cheeks, and I sniffled a quiet sob. “No,” I replied meekly, quietly, still afraid.

“Thalia, this kind of behavior is unacceptable,” my father lectured, striding over a few paces and closing my window. “You know that you’re not allowed outside for a reason.”

“Not a good one!” I cried, sobbing, not quite thinking about what I was saying until my father’s head turned to me, eyes narrowed.

“What did you just say?”

“Nothing. I’m sorry—“

“You’re grounded, Thalia,” my father told me, leaving no room for rebuttal. “End of story.” He walked out of the room then, and I ended up crawling into bed without giving the punishment much thought. I was already locked in the house; I didn’t know how much more grounded I could honestly be.

That is, until I woke up to an absolutely barren room. My bookshelf was empty, my canvas and paints were gone, my ukelele was gone. Even my record player and my vinyls were gone. All that I had left in my room were my clothes and… well, there wasn’t much else besides that. It took a moment to process what I was seeing. It was about 7 am, and my father was gone; he had taken all of my entertainment along with him. I rolled out of bed to inspect a slip of paper taped to the door that read, “I left breakfast on your dresser. I’ll be back to bring you lunch, and we can talk about this when I’m home from work later. Hopefully, you’ll see how lucky you have it here.”

My eyes scanned around in shock to spot a bowl of cereal and milk sitting on the dresser, like he’d promised, but it was starting to dawn on me that I was about to sit alone for hours with nothing to do. In a panic, I gripped my hands around the door knobs and tugged violently, but it was locked tight. I tore open the top drawer of my dresser, where I usually kept my bobby pins, but they were gone too. I fell back onto the floor both in horror and in defeat. What was I supposed to do? There was nothing, absolutely nothing.

I ended up sitting in front my bed, staring at the door until my father came home to bring me lunch, and I did the same thing for the other half of the day before he came home for the evening.