Fallin' Apart

• Isabella Roberts, Grade 9
• Poetry
• 2011

Five years.
That’s how long Sarah spent on the streets. Five years she spent sleeping on park benches and in stranger’s houses, stealing food and hiding out in shops to stay warm. Five years of being alone.
She had rules, once she hit the street. Lines she had drawn, promises she had made to herself.
Rule number one, was, she never gave herself to strangers. There had been offers. She’d always refuse, no matter how desperate or hungry she was or how much money was offered.
Rule number two was, she didn’t do drugs. There had been plenty of offers. Scoring pot or E was easy at parties.
But she had promised herself a long time ago, even before she ran away, that she wouldn’t turn into her ma. And in order to do that, she had to avoid making the same mistakes.
But sometimes, when she was at a party, she’d done things, because it was expected...she stayed away from drugs, but she drank a lot and she would get pretty wasted. It made things go smoother. She’d done other things, too... because they were expected. Once the party was over, if she wanted to be able to stay for a few days, she had to - and a warm house was better than park benches. They would feed her, give her a place to sleep... And she never went all the way with them. But she’d wake up the next day on a park bench with no idea how she’d gotten there, wearing someone else’s clothes, and sometimes she wouldn’t have her underwear anymore.
And when winter came, and it was too cold to sleep outside, Sarah made the rounds of all the colleges, getting drunk in common rooms and sleeping on any available couch. She overheard some guys laughing about it, telling stories about what they’d done with her. They hadn’t, but they told the stories anyway.
It was Sarah’s birthday, and she had spent the better part of her day thinking about those lines she had drawn, the promises she had made, as she wandered in and out of all the shops trying to stay warm. She had been wondering if there was a difference between getting wasted every other night on pot and getting wasted every other night on booze. Either way you still ended up on a bench in the morning without your underwear.
Sarah had thought she had drawn lines for herself-that she had made promises to herself and kept them-but everything got complicated and confused. All the lines she ever tried to draw, all the promises she ever tried to make... they got blurry, and they got broken.
She didn’t know what happened. She didn’t know how she’d gotten here. She didn’t know where she went wrong.