Running From The Truth

A woman tells about her hard-knock life.

I saw my mother crying, my father with a cold glare in his eye. I was 10. That was when I realized who my parents were, what my life was. My father would hit my mother, and my mother would take it, she would cry when she thought my father couldn't hear. But he could hear, and it would make him madder. When I was 12, I ran away. I couldn't take it anymore, so I packed my things one night, stole some of the family money, and ran. Since then, I've tried not to think about my parents, or the fact that my father is know in prison, my mother falling apart. No. I run from that, from the past, my past. I run from the truth. Why? Why can't I just face it? Sometimes I want to go home, pull my mother together...but then I think about my childhood, and I can't...can't go back there, to that. Those two years of my sorry existance were pure hell, and just thinking about it makes me feel like that hell is going to swallow me again. And so I keep running. I ran to New York, to a new life. I slept under a cardboard box on the streets. I ate what I could find in the garbage or what I kind stranger would kindly give me. It wasn't a nice life, but it wasn't hell either.