Adrenaline coursed through my veins as I ran and kept running until the air in my lungs sounded like the thunder that booms through the world, in the worst thunderstorm. The memories of what would happen if I got caught jolted to the front of my mind, but my legs kept moving unconsciously. Even if it was unreasonable, I still wanted him to apologize for what he did to me. I still wanted a reason for his awful actions, he took my innocence and my peace of mind. I will never forget what happened, when he walked in and the sun was long gone and the moon was bright in the sky. He would hit me and cut me, telling me "You did good."

When he was finished with me then he would walk out, like I was a cheap whore that the world could just throw away. As if my life was worth nothing. This was the scarring and emotionally traumatizing, the walking out. He gave me life and could take it away. He said that often. He liked telling me, I was a burden, and I deserved the…. I don't even know…. the beating... I guess. He liked when I cried out. He really liked pleas for help. He would say "no one is going to help you, you cheap whore."

I am happy and felt like the weight was lifted off me when Ella got away from him without the beatings and anything he would have done to her, that he didn't do to me because I'm a man. She got approved into a foreign exchange program before she got on the opposing side of his anger when he got drunk. I was jolted back to the present, when I found an open taxi and the driver looked tired and it was barely a work hour, as the moon was rising. Something about my mangled and cut up appearance must have given the impression, I was in something of an emergency.

The taxi had barely gotten on the highway I-95, when the tow truck beeped and there was a devastatingly loud crash and the pricks spread up my legs like they had fallen asleep, but I couldn't feel them anymore. Someone was pressing down on my ribs and kept telling me...

"Live kid you have to live. Come on! You have to live." His voice broke in the middle of it.

There wouldn't be any use in fighting to live; they would just bring me back to that hellhole with that mother, who would ignore my cries for help. And that abuser who did nothing but drink and hit me my entire life. However, there was Ella, but she was better off without me anyway. Who would want me, the person who gave up? The person who ran away when they could have fought. Right before my sight it was dark, I heard someone say in a tragic voice.

"It was a cataclysmic crash with a taxi driver and a tow truck driver that works for Express Towing, both the taxi driver named Jerald Newerald and a 15-year-old boy named Matthew James has tragically died. The driver of the tow truck named Jason Trumberry, has lived with major injuries, he will never walk again."

Then it was pitch black and the darkness felt oppressive, heavy and like forgotten dreams and disappointments. My life and the light I am so accustomed to have never existed in this hell of nothing. I am kept awake by shadows, but I know I have never slept there. There was no time, no day and night cycle, we so rely on, to keep us sane. At one point I thought I saw a lighter shade of black.

The little bit of hope I had compressed in the farthest place in my mind, had come rushing back like a wave back to the ocean, with that one tiny color change. The hope started, and I know I will find a way out of here. Even if it takes time, which I have not known in an eternity. My legs had started moving at some point when my brain was thinking. Then I kept walking even when I couldn't keep walking, I still walked.

The movements in walking were something I had never thought about before. First you pull your foot back and push it further than the opposite foot, you must make sure to bend the knee. Then you pull the other foot adjacent to the foot you just moved to right in front of the first foot. Then you keep repeating it.

The thoughts running through my head were "pull…. push…other foot."

"Pull…push…other foot."

Then I continued until the ground fell through. I tried to grab something, anything. I couldn't even scream because I knew it wouldn't do anything. In this dark place filled with nothing, there would be nobody to hear me scream when I died a second time. I know everybody always says when you experience near death you get a flashback of your life. I can't think of anything that is important for death a second time.