Starter

Your thoughts get lost in the ocean
and your prides as strong as the sea
your heart is blocked by a rain cloud
only thunder and rain can be seen

Do you ever think there's someone out
There looking over you
watching everything you do
Looking after you

© Lee Ryan – Guardian Angel

A Family Portrait

Dishes rattled. Plates and mugs shattered on the white kitchen tiles. A few drops of blood fell down. A young woman licked her bloody finger. A short silence followed, echoing through the entire house. But even in this silence you could hear the last sentences of anger vibrating in the air. The next moment the woman got her hands on a mug and threw it at the man in front of her.

Porcelain wasn't the only thing flying through the room. Harsh words came through two hoarse throats. They were meant to hit each other one, to hurt if possible. Hooker and fuckwit were almost friendly compared to other profanities the six-year-old girl had to listen to from the landing. She sat still on the tiled stairs. Her hands - first shaking around the bars of the railing - were now pressed to her ears. Silence. Sweet, soft, wonderful silence.

Long ago little Isabella gave up on walking to her parents to try and beg them to be happy again. She knew by now that it wouldn't help. Her tears wouldn't bring peace to the family. Just like all her prayers to god had been just a waste of time.

It was a scene that repeated itself over and over again for many years. But the girl grew up and learned to handle it differently. Isabella Marie didn't stay to sit at the landing when her parents started fighting in the middle of the night again. She didn't even pray anymore. She climbed out of the window, down the vine and vanished into the night. She dreamed of never coming back but in the end she always did.

The worst for her wasn't the fights anymore but the endless attempts of getting back together, until Renée finally decided on a divorce. Bella had always felt sick whenever her parents told each other tales of undying love. As a little girl she wished for those moments, as a teenager she finally understood that it would lead to nothing but another fight. And new pain. She would just shake her head and leave the house more often nowadays. She was fifteen when the divorce became inevitable and the house grew quiet in a completely new way. There were still fights but mostly on the phone and Bella knew how to get around those. She either hung up whenever she saw her Dad's number on the display and wouldn't tell her mother he called at all - or she would leave the house and let her mother fight with him alone.

When the divorce finally became real everything calmed down. There was a fight at her sixteenth birthday party, but Bella wasn't even there when her parents started to yell at each other.

Sometimes she went away for days. Mostly on those days when her parents met with their lawyers to talk about the house they used to live in as a family or Isabella herself. She didn't care about either topic. She didn't want to choose whether to live with her Mum or her Dad. It didn't really matter to her anymore. She would just take whatever was easier. If she could have chosen, she would have left the crazy family behind any day. Never returning. But her thoughts always did. Sometimes she lay awake in bed and tried to figure out when it all went wrong. She never remembered a time without yelling and tears. It always got loud and mean. It hurt. Bella closed her eyes forcefully and shook her head. One day she had asked Renée. She didn't even know how she came up with such an unreasonable idea, as her mother would clearly say it was all her father's fault. It was a long list of things he could have done but never did, a list filled with unanswered desires and let down dreams. But when she asked how it all began, her mother's eyes filled with tears she never spilled that day. "I think it was when I lost the baby. He never got over that." Bella had simply nodded and left quickly. She could only faintly remember visiting her mother in a hospital. Those pictures sometimes found their way into her dreams. She had been three years old. She was supposed to be the older sister of a little boy who would have been called Alexander. But that never happened and she almost forgot about it. Her parents never tried again, or so Bella thought. She couldn't believe that there had been much room for tenderness between all the screaming and broken dishes.

Her father moved out when she had been fourteen. Not officially of course. He left most of his stuff and would come back every now and then, but he found his own flat and finally got some space for himself. She never understood why it had taken him so long. Bella wanted to move out ever since she was twelve. She had been happy when he was gone. Maybe that was why she remembered that night so well. He had come into her room silently and stood there next to her bed for what felt like hours. She had pretended to be asleep. He had kissed her forehead and whispered: "Don't worry Bells, everything will be fine soon." Then he was gone. With the car that belonged to his wife. Bella only stood up when she couldn't hear he engine anymore, walked into the bathroom, washed of the kiss and went back to bed.

By now she was almost seventeen. Only two more weeks were left until the party she had planned without anyone who was related to her in the slightest. She had a plan. She would run away two days before her birthday. Renée never called the police – she knew her daughter would come back at some point, just like she had done for years now. She'd come back home and never talk about where she had been or what she had done. Her mother had no saying in that anymore anyway.

Bella had no friends at her school. It was a christian-girls-only-school and everyone there knew how different she was. The private school was paid for by her grandmother who gave her the middle name Marie she just hated, which was why she only rebelled against it more.

Her life, the one she chose to have, mainly happened on the streets of Seattle. In the less attractive parts of the city she would meet up with those she considered her friends, mainly because they understood what she searched for and what she wanted in life, but also because no one there ever asked her annoying questions or tried to tell her what to do. She had been accepted into the scene when she had been twelve years old. Most people here had been to rehab at least once and Bella could count down on her fingers that it was only a matter of time until she would need that too. But she wasn't afraid of it. She was questioning and challenging life each day. She didn't believe in any sort of positive emotions of commitment. Love was a thing for books and TV shows. She never saw it in real life and doubted highly that it was even possible to exist to those extremes society talked about. Love at first sight.

She was the only girl in her group without a relationship so she had no boyfriend to stay with. Instead she would sleep on the couch of a punk girl called Alice. A while ago she would have stayed at Jake's almost every night, but he was dead. He had been found with a needle in his arm. She hadn't been sad, though they were close, just angry that he left her behind on earth.

That was her life. Bella knew it was pretty fucked up. But she didn't want it to change when she put the bottle of vodka to her lips. She just wanted to knock herself out and forget the world around her for a while. That was her philosophy and it worked pretty well right now so why change it?