I can feel my heart thump in my chest, adrenaline bursting through my veins. The cold night air blows against my face as I run. Though the sun is gone, nothing is asleep on this Friday night. I can hear the faint honking of cars on the distant city streets. I am running towards the populated area. As I am running, I start to think back, back to my youth, back to my happiest moments in life.
I think about my earliest childhood years first; the days that unicorns existed and the monster in my closet wanted me for his lunch. The nights I would stay up waiting for Santa Claus and the tooth fairy, as well as the nights I would cry as I awoke from a nightmare, how my parents would come to comfort me back to sleep. If it wasn’t for my current situation, I would chuckle at how much I detested broccoli and all the silly tricks my parents used to get me to eat them.
I then remember my teen years. How much of a rebel I was, or at least thought I was. It was in those years that I started to make choices I still regret to this day. The years in my life when all I wanted was to be “cool”, to be “mature”, to be “independent” from my parents. I would hang out with people- real bad influences. I did it thinking it made me what I wanted to be. All my teen years left for me were divorced parents, addiction to drugs, and people who I wish I could just never see again, but they keep me chained, trapped, isolated.
My twenties weren’t any better, college drop-out, history of destructive relationships. I just couldn’t find “the one”. My addiction wouldn’t leave, try as I might. My “friends” wouldn’t let me leave, either. I lost contact with my family, with good friends I had in college, with everyone who tried to help me see I was only hurting myself with my choices. Wish I could say it was my “friends” that drove those good people away, but I knew it was me.
Twenty-eight and all I have to my name is twenty-five bucks, run-down crack house apartment, crippling addictions, and a minimum wage job at a shit bar. I had blamed my parents, good friends, family, anyone that was nice to me, even those that hurt me- I blamed all of them for my life being as it is. I blamed them for what was happening to me, pushing them further and further out of reach, to the point where I can’t reach them, even if I spent the rest of my life trying. Maybe, just maybe, I could’ve reached my parents, but you can’t find help and comfort from those who are already dead. I put myself here, in this bad environment, in this shitty life situation. I put myself here.
I think this as I find myself trapped at a dead-end alley. Not a single soul around. I ran my entire life, feigning ignorance of my bad choices. As I look at this wall, I finally feel all my bad choices catching up to me. Every single choice in my life, whether it was good or bad, this is where it all led me. I closed my eyes, I knew there was no more running, no more hiding. The person I was running from had finally caught up to me. This was the end and the only one to blame was myself, I felt my regrets pierce me as the knife did. The only solace I have felt in eighteen years, at least I will see my parents again.