Witness

Emptiness. Empty house, empty rooms, empty cupboards, empty shelves...empty soul.

I felt so strange right now, as I walked through the rooms of what was once my favorite place on earth. Each room which had once been different in its own special and unique way was now the same as the room I'd just left, and the room I could just walk into. There was no furniture to define room from room, and no pictures on the wall that mapped my progress of life, and our strengths as a family, that were now slowly crumbling away.

The only proof that we'd ever been here was a yellow nicotine patch on the ceiling above where my father’s armchair once sat, or a stain or two on the carpet from my carelessness as a child. Mum had usually just covered them with a rug or a table, but now they were all packed into boxes and vans, so there was nothing to hide the tales that could be told from that one purple stain on the carpet.

I was about three or four, and still not all too steady on my feet. I'd been carrying a carton of Ribena, and Dad had jumped out from behind the sofa yelling the so obvious word "Boo", if it could be classified as a word of course. I had jumped, because being only three years old, I wasn't expecting silly Daddy jump out and make me jump like that, so in surprise, I'd squeezed the carton, causing the Ribena to squirt out of the straw.
I hadn't noticed, I was too busy laughing, but Dad had instantly got to work trying to hide it before mum came home and got mad. I remember the way that he’d repeated over and over again for me “Not to tell mummy.” She found the stain though, about three weeks later...When I showed it to her.

Smiling fondly at the memory, I made my way to my old room. It's strange how some posters and a few sticks of furniture can really make a huge difference to the way a room looked. I could almost see parts of my childhood acting out in front of me whenever I looked at certain parts of the room. Life was simple then. I didn't have to worry about money, or the deal that my father made to try and make life a little easier for all of us. I didn’t know of how hard life could actually be, and I didn’t know how badly things could end if you made ‘friends’ with the wrong people.

The world isn’t a nice place, but children never know that do they? The only problems they ever have is the maths homework they were set that night, or the toy that got lost under the bed, but they were too afraid to go under there to get it. In some ways I wish the monster under the bed was still the scariest thing I knew of.

“You ready to go, sweetie?” My Mum asked as she walked into my ex-room. She noticed my looking around at the walls almost lovingly and smiled sadly at me. “C’mon baby. We need to...we need to move on, start a new leaf and all that jazz,”

“I know, I just don’t think I can without my Dad,”

“I know what you mean, and I’m not going to lie and say that it will be easy, but time heals all wounds, and soon enough, you’ll still be sad about what happened, but you’ll think more of the happy times you spent with him, more than the sadness you feel of his passing-“

“Murder,” I interrupted bitterly.

“Frank, please don’t make this harder than it already is,”

I looked at her in disbelief. “You’re actually calling me Frank?!”

“Well, I’m going to have to get used to using your new name,”

“No mum, that isn’t my name,”

“It has to be, I’m not allowed to call you Anthony anymore,”

“This is absolute bullshit,” I cried, putting my face into my hands and letting out a long sigh to try and hold in tears that I just knew were trying to fight their way through the layer of skin referred to as an eyelid.

“I know it’s hard to come to terms with, but this is the way it has to be, for our own safety. Your father would want us to be safe,”

I pulled my hands slowly from my face and looked at my mother, her age showing drastically in only the past couple of days. She used to spend ages, prettying herself up in the morning, now; she either has no-one to impress, or just no interest in glaming her-self up.

Losing someone that close to you really does put everything else in your life on hold.
She smiled sadly at me once more, and placed her hand on the small of my back, giving me a small almost reassuring push towards the door. We walked together through the now cold and empty rooms of the house, breathing almost silently to preserve the many memories from each room, before stepping into the front hallway, looking back one last time and walking out of the front door.

I climbed into the car that would be taking us on half of the two or three hour journey to the airport. It was going to be driven by a police officer, and we would have to swap cars half way, in case anyone followed us. It was all pretty daunting actually.

All our stuff was probably already about half way there, but obviously no-one would think to follow a simple moving van. Well, one would hope anyway.

I could feel a lump in my throat as the car started to drive away from the home that I’d grown up in, that now had a large ‘for sale’ sign in the front garden where Gary the garden gnome used to sit, and welcome our guests. I’d probably never see it again, at least in its current state. Someone else would purchase this house, and then taint it. They’d put in their own furniture, their own photographs, and their own lives. They shouldn’t. That home is mine.

* * *

I took everything in. Every house that we drove past and every tree that turned into a mere splat of brown and green across my vision. Every Californian detail, I took it all in. The place I had been born and had grown up was now getting smaller and smaller and smaller. I was leaving my old life, and truly believed that I had boarded the plane as Anthony Thomas Jr, but would be leaving it in New York as Frank Iero, before crossing over the state into New Jersey where I would begin my new life.

It’s always in the weirdest situations that everything hits you. There has been so many times where I could have realized the true intensity of what had happened recently. I could have realized in the car, sitting on the other side of the wall that probably saved my life, when I got home, at the station, the next day, or walking around my empty house, but now, I came to terms with everything while sitting on a plane full of other people. It hit me so hard that I was certain the place had crashed and I was now crushed in between my own seat and the back of the seat in front. Then I let it out. I let everything out and cried.

People often say your life can’t just change overnight. They were right. Mine changed a whole lot quicker.