This place wasn't home. It was a prison. The grey walls were almost mocking me with their dull demeanor, the lack of furniture making it feel like I was on death row. All I had was a rough and thin mattress, with a thin metal and squeaky bed frame that looked like one from a mental hospital. A thin white blanket rested on the bed as my only source of warmth but the cold of the room seeped into my bones. The popcorn ceiling was quaking from the stomps upstairs, and there was no other furniture around my room. The only window looked out into the backyard of my foster home, the dead grass a fitting look. It was miserable, even the sky was grey and morbid. I could smell a thickness in the air, moisture clinging to it storm clouds rolled in. My only break from the eerieness was my phone playing videos in the background as I mindlessly watched them. I didn't have much else to do with my time other than watch various videos on my phone, or stare out the window. After the crash I was placed with my estranged grandmother on my father's side. To say the least, there was a reason he was estranged. She was a loud, bigoted, rude racist old woman who absolutely hated the sight of me. She hated both my stepmother and my mother for either racial or religious reasons. My mother was Jewish, and I wore her old star of David around my neck. She had tried to pry it off me, but instead confined me to my room. She would take the money meant for me from being disabled from the government and spend it on her gambling or anything else she wanted. The most she did was leave shit TV dinners at my room around dinner time, giving me only one meal a day. Because of this, I was pretty thin as the meals she often gave me were very small and other than water I could get from the bathroom when I went that was all I had. I remembered once a year ago I had gone to get something from the kitchen. I was beaten so blue and my face so swollen I looked like I had during the crash. I may have been twenty now, but with stolen income and no voice I was perpetually trapped. I could hear her upstairs, stomping and grunting and everytime her footsteps grew close to me I would flinch. I could still hear the annoying drone of the cable Christian television shows blaring through the house. It made me sick to my stomach. These people preached love, and charity but she was perfectly okay with her granddaughter rotting alone in her room. The only escape I had was my phone, and my eyes were zoned into it. I had started watching video games playthroughs, because I wasn't allowed to play any because she thought they were the devil. On a very low volume, I laid on my side watching the screen as Resident Evil 7 played before me. I thought it was appropriate during my own situation of being incarcerated in a abusive home, but the person narrating their playthrough had me in secret stitches. I was smiling slightly, distracted by the gloom and doom around me. It was a small light in a overwhelming darkness, and pulled me away from the thoughts of courts, and tbe growing dread that came with every footstep outside. Just as the thought rab through my head and rain started to pelt the side of the house like hail the peeling door buckled under the slamming behind it.
"Get your fucking food!" My grandmothers voice screamed. Her voice was hoarse from years of abuse from cigarettes and alcohol, and even without looking behind the door I knew she looked just as fried. Picture the a uncle from Harry Potter and Doctor Emmet Brown had a baby, that was a grandmother. She was a large and robust woman with frizzy white hair that stood on end. She smelled of cat urine and smoke, had breasts that sagged because she refused to wear a bra, and she never went anywhere with her grim and gross frown. I could hear her stomp away from the door and I finally deflated a bit, the shivering from my nerves coming down as she got farther away. The anxiety was almost too much to bear. I managed to pull myself up, not because I wanted to but my stomach was coiling from hunger. My legs lay in a useless bundle, and I could only stare at the contorted shapes in dismay. Everytime I looked my eyes the scene popped back into mind. Everytime I slept it haunted me. I barely had the motivation to reach from my chair and get the food behind the door. A small part of me was convinced that having me be in this world was some kind of burden, even though deep down I knew that was the sly voice of depression speaking. It took all I could muster to scoot myself to the side of my bed and pull myself into my chair. It was a long and arduous process, but I pushed with all my might.
My reward? Two cold pizza pockets waiting for me behind that door. Even as I shoveled the food into my mouth, I knew as pathetic as I felt that I was fighting to stay alive. I was fighting for my family, for the truth, and for myself. Even if the world didn't want to hear it, or if home wasn't really a home a part of me was hell bent an determined to stay alive to see this through to the end. The voices on the phone holding my sanity in place, I steeled my nerves as cold as the food I was given.