If our walls were made of books, I would've read them all. The patterns on the wallpaper were used to the feeling of my fingertips, softly gliding over them as tears escaped from my eyes. The walls themselves, much like me, were used to the feeling of a hard blow, making them shake before they were precipitously still again. The floor was a companion, a friend who would catch me when I fell, collecting the precious tears that landed over the years. I always wanted a real friend, someone who I could tell everything to, but I was never allowed a friend, not anyone I could tell anything to.
Me and my peers weren't similar, not in any way, but the walls felt familiar. They were like a shield, they could protect me, at least they always tried to. The walls were like me, they would also shake at the sound of my fathers shouts, and they would tremble at my mothers cries. The walls inside, knew things that the ones outside would never think were true. For outside was like a painting, clean white bricks, freshly painted white picket fences and a porch wrapping all around. The perfect home, people always wave and smile, a respectable house in a lovely neighbourhood, perfect was our cover. Inside however must envy those bricks, not only do they see the sun everyday, but they don't have to hear the cries that for many years we didn't even understand.
I lived there my whole life, haunted by those noises I heard too much. For sixteen of those years I had no clue why my mother would scream at him. Why would she want him away from her, were they not in love? At night I would lay in bed afraid, afraid that my parents didn't love each other anymore, but now I know they probably never did. I never left the house apart from school, my father didn't want me talking to people, telling them about my family, the family I loved and once wanted to share. I learned how to entertain myself, looking at photos, reading fairy tales, and I even taught myself how to paint.
Eventually my father realised that I simply had no friends, and therefore I had nobody to tell anything to. So once I had run out of fairy tales to read, my father told me a story he claimed was his favourite fairy tale, my parents story. My father was a university lecturer in London, after my uncle, his brother, died, he quit his job and became a writer. He then met my mother and he always emphasised the part where it was love at first sight, he would grin from ear to ear whilst my mother sat sheepishly in the corner, I suspect she wasn't even listening or just trying not to. He always skipped one large detail about their fairy tale wedding though, something I only figured out through birthdays and their wedding date. My father was forty three when he married my mother, she was only seventeen, I was born one year later.
At night I would hear my mother cry, I would never understand her words. In my books the princesses loved being held, and princes were never told to let go. I loved my father, he was gentle most of the time, he would raise his voice at my mother and occasionally me too, but he was kind to me as a child. He would buy me toys, books, and the occasional cake on my birthday. but as I got older, the less gentle he became. He would shout, and he would throw things, but not at the walls anymore, he would throw them at me. The day of my seventeenth birthday, a switch in my father flipped, that's when those words I would hear my mother shout finally made sense to me. Suddenly against that wall, beneath his once gentle fatherly hands, I understood what she had been going through every single night, for all of those years.
Even during the summertime I would feel cold, shivering under the sun begging it to shine. At night sleep would taunt me, laughing every time I thought he would let me rest. Outside in the garden, with the low fences, and the neighbours lounging on sun chairs my life was almost good again. My parents were a happy couple with their one perfect little daughter, the perfect little daughter who just a year ago wasn't used to the feeling of a blow that now she was immune to.
I was never allowed past that gate, but now I stride through it with nobody there to stop me. Some days I just walk through it and then back again to do the things I never could, at night I lay with my mother, stroking her bruised shoulders hoping she can feel it. I know that me leaving was hard on her, but at least now I can comfort her, I couldn't do that before. I have friends now, people I can talk to, I can learn their stories and learn why they left too. I'm no longer alone anymore, and I'm no longer afraid. I broke that deceiving wall and now light shines through, the light I was once kept from. Today would have been my eighteenth birthday, but now I get the life I deserve, away from the monster who I now know was never holding me out of love.
Now, I get to breathe.
