Some Wounds Are Timeless

This is my first truely unhappy memory:

"Their yells are barely noticeable from beneath my firmly held earmuffs I had fashioned from my favorite down pillow. They were at it again tonight, I thought as I struggled not to overhear the crash of plates shattering on the tile kitchen floor. Some nights I wish I could just sail away as if my water bed were the open sea. They've been at each others' throats for months and the end of this storm is nowhere in sight.

Months pass and the yells get harder and harder to drown from my twin size ocean. And try as I might mom and dad wont even eat with each other anymore. I never imagined they would let their differences come between us. I had hoped they would be able to fix things, but its nothing short of a lost cause.

Their separation came suddenly and they asked me to make a choice. Me, a nine year-old, who's spent the last year of his life crying in his room trying to drown out his parent's fights with his own sobs. How is he supposed to decide who he belongs with? How is he supposed to know where the better path lays? I choose the nurturing arms of my mother over the entertaining faces of my father.

We never spoke about my father after that. I became more reserved and stopped making friends. I decided that my memories would be kept safer if I made them with the few people I knew I could entrust them to. My friends became closer than family to me. My humor seemed to disguise my depression fairly well. I started doing impressions because I enjoyed imagining myself as anyone else but me. I hated not having them both more than hearing them fight."

This is when I began holding it all in. This was the bomb that dropped on my expressive former-self.

I don't look back on this much, because of the pain it now reminds me of. I have decided that they did the right thing. I can not hate them for it. I can only imagine what things would be like if they had figured out a way to stay together if for nothing else but for my sister and I.