Familiar Feeling

• Aleisha Hackney, Grade 11
• Short Story
• 2014

As I stood, the air chilled around me. My face was frozen with fear as I saw her face in a distant haze. I had not known this girl, we had not spoken a word. It was dark in this place, as the mist crawled around me. I looked upon her face and gave her one last glance before I Turned away and stepped into further darkness. The streetlight burned bright in the distant and the abrupt movement to my right shook the tree branches. It was a bad place, where I stood and felt at home. The abandoned town is where I loved, it’s all I have ever really known.
As night turned to day, I awoke to the broken and dead branches of the trees surrounding me. This life is nothing of my dreams I wondered as I forward my thoughts on to how it became. It will be delightful they say as the broken pieces fall to place. Their convincing faces to cover the nightmare beginning. I knew in the depth of my heart the unspoken words were the truth and this…. Is not my destiny?
My parents left me when I was quite young. Abandoned on a doorstep in North Carolina with the empty feeling to grow up so familiar with. I don’t know if uncertainty was the key to my parent’s choices or if I was an unwanted child. Their decisions have left darkness in my heart since the first day. Now I’m of age 17, stumbling through the gutter of a broken street.
I looked up to the image of this figure again. An unspoken word, a beautiful girl. I continued opposite to where she was and I walked forward and to the door of my own. At the time I was situated in an old shed, just towards the middle of this town. I hadn’t ever had a real home; I always had myself and never anyone else. I never remembered clear phases of why I was here; I barely remember how I came to this age. I always hoped that when I was a youth, someone nice had taken me under their shelter and called me their own. I do not recall any further back from now. Every time I have a slight thought, I regress and slip away into my dreams.