Merkury

This isn't finished.

I don�t know where I�m supposed to begin. I�m twenty-one years old and I�ve already lost my faith in love. I�m writing you because I�ve spent my entire life wondering what was wrong with me, searching for answers to all the mental problems I thought I had. I�ve told every guy who has ever liked me that I�m crazy and they should run away. Eventually they do, leaving me in tears, wondering yet again why I act the way I do, or say the things I say, or why no one can see me or how much I need someone to help.

My mother will tell you none of her girls ever lacked for any love. However feeling loved and feeling wanted can be completely different things. Growing up I never felt wanted, and I never felt beautiful. In my younger childhood my best friend Noelle was beautiful, and so was her mother. It was as if a white light shown on them when I looked. I admired them intensely for the short amount of time they were in my life. Change comes fast when you�re small. Later in life I learned how take care of myself from different friends and their families. I learned the most from a woman I adopted as my foster mother, Cindy Hoyle. Cindy has two daughters and a son, just like my mother. That was the only thing she had in common with my mother, who was quiet and contemporary. Cindy was strong natured, loud and beautiful. She could find humor in everything. Cindy�s oldest daughter, Heather, became my best friend instantly when I saw her coloring a picture of Sailor Moon on the school buss. Since that day we were nearly inseparable.

My family life was difficult for me but I couldn�t begin to tell you why. I was angry. When my parents sat me down in our living room along with my older brother and younger sister and told me they were separating it didn�t come as a shock. It was the fact that it didn�t that surprised me. Not even a week later my siblings and I had been at my grandmother�s house with our father. When we came home the house was a wreck. We thought we had been burglarized. All the lights were on and things like our fathers bed was missing. I remember thinking who would steal a bed? Later when my mother came back to pick us up she did more damage that she knows even now. �I have to have my girls,� she said. She didn�t say anything about my brother, who was watching from the couch. We were crying, packing our things in a hurry. Mom went back to her car, we were hugging our dad. �Go tell your mom goodbye,� he said. �You�re never going to see her again.� He was angry. We ran to her car screaming. �Daddy said, daddy said�� She told us to get in the car and lock the doors. We did. Our father worked, our mother didn�t. We were young; we loved them both, but she was all we really knew. It was simple as that. The last thing I remember about that day was my father punching furiously at my window while my mother sped out of our driveway.

I couldn�t tell you why I hated school after that. I didn�t like being around anyone. My stomach started to hurt a lot, nearly every day. I think my parents began to believe I was faking sick so I could stay home. The only time I wouldn�t beg to stay home was if my brother was staying home. Even before my mother left my father my brother and I fought. We spent most of our lives hating each other despite my mother�s warnings that we would one day need each other. We had our own ways of coping with our lives. I stopped going to school, he stopped talking. He didn�t laugh at all, and he covered his mouth when he smiled, which wasn�t very often. He lived at our dads and my sister and I lived with our mom. He visited on weekends. He hated it; always wanted to go home. Once he slammed the car door so hard the window shattered and cut his face in about a hundred places. I think he was even angrier than I was.

My sister and I had started fighting by that point. I would lash out at her over what now seems like nothing. A phone call, a story told the wrong way. A joke she botched up. I began to feel like a stranger in my own home. The only time I was happy was when I was with Heather and her family. This happened to be the main reason my mother and I didn�t get along. I think she was jealous. She felt that I spend too much time with her and her family. Maybe she was right. My sister grew very close to my mother those days. She would spend entire evenings in my mother�s bedroom endlessly talking about school and animals and who knows what else. I moved out. I couldn�t stand it anymore. I lived with a guy friend with his brother, mother, mother�s girlfriend and two other kids she had taken in. Their family was unique; kind. I loved it there. It didn�t last long. After that I lived out of a bag; sometimes at my dad�s house, sometimes at my moms, and sometimes at Heather�s. Sometimes I would sneak in through her window and stay for a week without her parents even knowing. Even when they did know I would stay for weeks at a time and if I wasn�t at her house she was one of mine.

My last two years of high school things started to work themselves out. I was getting along with my parents better and found myself with a more permanent room at my mom�s, and I was making decent grades despite the fact that I was hardly ever at school. I was on my way to our lunch room when I was stopped by our principal who no one liked and vice principal who everyone liked. They wanted to search my bags. My sister had been caught at school with rolling papers and cigarettes. I had bought them for her, so her school felt it necessary to call mine. Thanks. When I got home that day my mother had ran sacked out rooms. Things were turned over, mattresses off the bed frames, dresser drawers still open, cloths all over the floor. She was highly upset.

The second betrayal came at a greater shock that the first one did. My mother was standing with her back to me, looking outside. I guess she heard me coming because she spun around and beamed at me. �Hi,� she says, all cheerful, and then without a smile or anything she says, �We need to talk, come on,� and heads outside. I looked in the office for back up but no one was there. I followed her outside. She turns around again then, smiling like before. �Your aunt Donna is in town, she�s passing through on business, she wanted to see you.� Now, it didn�t hit me at the time that my Aunt Donna, being an Avon lady, wouldn�t be anywhere near here on business. I got in her car, which was packed full of our things. I asked her what was going on but she didn�t answer. She took me to a church parking lot down the road from our house. Donna had her RV parked there. Laura was there with her dog, Sassy. She was walking her around the parking lot. We should have run. Right then we should have run as fast as we could but we couldn�t move. We were being kidnapped. We were being taken away from everything we�d ever known. I fought her, she couldn�t take me, I was too big but my sister wasn�t. Our Aunt, who was much bigger than our mother, forced my sister into the RV and locked her in. I could hear her screaming. My friend Daniel came and got me, we went to my mother�s house.

We found the door standing open, every light in the house on. Everything was gone. For the second time in my life it looked like we had been robbed. There wasn�t a stick of furniture in our living room or kitchen, the only things still in the house where in my room. My sister�s things were missing; mother had packed her entire room. It occurred to be that I hadn�t been forced into the van because I was big enough to fight back, but she had simply chosen not to take me.

Half way back to Nebraska my sister tried to run away. That scared my mother half to death. She brought her back only to abduct her again a few days later. I was called down to the office again. I didn�t go. The vice principal had to come get me. She sat in her office with me and my mom who only wanted to say goodbye. She talked and I cried. I didn�t hear anything she said. When it was my time to talk all I could chock out was �I want my sister back,� but it was already too late. My mother had signed over her parental rights to a group home in Chrome, South Carolina. It was called �New Hope School for Girls.� My father and I waited for six months to get my sister back. None of us could believe what she had done. We couldn�t understand it. The group home was a private Christian organization. They took her cloths and burned them. They made her wear dresses and sing during church. She wasn�t allowed to talk to anyone outside of the home, including me and my dad. She wasn�t allowed to talk our mother even though she was the one who put her there.