A Better Place

• Kayla Drysdale, Grade 10
• Short Story
• 2019

Take me to the place where the flowers are in full bloom, the sea water is heated and the sun is gleaming brighter than ever.

This is the place I long to be: the place of dreams, the place of photographed memories. This place is anxiety free, depression free, free of harm. It is a place where I can be myself without worrying about anyone else.

This place would be my second home. It would be a place free of heartbreak, free of sorrow, free of him. At this point in time I was in a state of 2am melancholy. Our photo album was a tear stained book of my hopes and dreams which was carelessly tossed out a shattered window. The window was in this state after years of abuse, years of beating. It had withstood the ferocious storms that were his outbursts and this time it finally smashed.This window was my heart, as much as I wish it wasn’t. This was the reality, this was the way it would always be.

The photo album makes it look as though everything was fine, but behind the photographs it was all falling apart. Our relationship consisted of him going out with friends, getting drunk, and then coming home to make me bleed, make me feel unloved. I stayed with him nonetheless, telling myself that he loved me, saying that he cared. I repeated this over and over as a reassurance but I kept getting distracted by the blood and the pain.

He really does love me. Doesn’t he?
Everyone tells me he shouldn't be hurting me but he can't help it, he’s drunk. What else is he going to do? It doesn’t even hurt anymore. It is like after you fall over a few times and it hurts but you keep doing it and then after a while you just go numb, that is exactly what it feels like. It is almost as though the pain has disappeared.

The reason our relationship has gone on for so long is because I am always second best, never good enough, always ‘just here’ and for once in my life I felt wanted.
The photo album keeps taking me back to the simpler days. The days when we were completely and utterly head-over-heels in love. We were like Romeo and Juliet and now I was the one who was dead. The way that he makes me feel, I might as well fall off the face of the earth. I used to put up with it, it used to be fine, but now it was like a horror show on repeat. I had now fallen over one too many times.

I couldn’t deal with this anymore. I locked myself in the bathroom, it could have passed as a freezer room by this point in the night, this was it, it was time for me to go to my happy place. It was time for me to leave these mortal shores.