Somewhere in the middle of the coldest winter that I can remember, my little brother and I got thrown into the streets.
Funnily enough, this time it wasn't even our fault. Not really anyway.
Our orphanage which was already under a massive debt, finally lost their rights to the land when the loan sharks came banging on their doors that evening and they couldn't pay up.
In not more than a few hours, everyone who lived there lost their closest thing to a home.
The loan sharks were anything but sympathetic. I found it hard to believe that anyone could evict minors knowing very well that if they don't get picked up by another orphanage, they literally had nowhere left to go. But one glance at their impassive expressions and we all knew that we'd not be getting any sympathy points from them.
I didn't wait around for the police to appear. If it had been just me, I'd simply steel my nerves and deal with whatever abuse I would have to go through at the new "home" I'd end up in. But since I had Cor, I wasn't a one man team and so I couldn't afford to take that risk.
Maybe it was because the responsibility of keeping myself and a thirteen year old boy alive out on the streets for who knew how long that terrified me. Every passing minute felt like a lifetime. As cliché as it sounded, all we had was each other. We had no money, no food and no home.
It's possible that I remembered that winter to be colder than any other, not because it actually was, but because of the unfortunate predicament we had been faced with. The days always feel longer the sooner you want them to end. It is no different with the cold.