The Sun Will Come Out
Chapter One
I suppose that the best excuse for my inabilities would be in my conditioning. Over the years of verbal, physical, and emotional abuse I had been conditioned to be a hollow shell. I was no more a person than I was an exotic pet or a star on the Broadway stage. I felt inhuman.
Inadequacy and undeserving, I could not better myself without pleasing others. I could not please others because I was inhuman.
For as long as I could remember, these emotions ran high in my life. I could not be better than I already was. I could not escape the terrible circumstances of my life for the very reasons that it was terrible. I was undeniably trapped. Enclosed in this box on the lonesome street of Hell's Kitchen, I was doomed to suffocate.
That was before Elizabeth was brought into my life. I loved that little girl more than life itself.
With her birth, her escape into life, I felt as though I had a chance, through her, to live again. To escape.
My reason to live was to ensure that she would never suffer the life I had suffered.
In my death, I had failed.
Another effect from my conditioning was that I had always accepted that I would be overlooked and ignored. When I became trapped within that Limbo, I had no bigger expectations either. What most spirits had the most difficulty with, being ignored and seen through by those they dearly loved, was simply another Friday night for me.
I watched from within a glass box, as I always had, and never anticipated a better outlook.
This went double for when I rested within the same glass walls beneath the streets. I had no emotional attachment or distinct memories of the family which resided there. I did not even know of their existence until I was long dead. Therefore, I never believed I would be found or seen.
Not until Michelangelo looked at me.
It broke my heart slightly as I felt the warmth of someone acknowledging my presence. The small, mutated child broke the barrier I had all but been accustomed to over the years. It was beautiful and glowing. It reminded me of the love I once shared with my little girl, the little girl I no longer could protect.
My heart laid shattered as he walked away at the beck and call of his brothers. He was clueless as to the importance of his look toward me. He would never know the bond that we then inexplicably shared over the smallest of small encounters. I would not forget, however, and I would not forget him.
Instead, I was quite set on following him and his brothers, toddling along expertly through the sludge of the sanitation system.
I wondered so much about them, more so than I ever had before.
Once they had been akin to a television program I could watch and enjoy from a distance. Now I was sucked into their world, wanting to live through them in the way I had once lived so candidly through Lizzie.
When their trail led them to a door and, behind that door, a series of small rooms I realized that they were not foundlings living on the scum of the earth but children, whose gray furred father waited upon them. He keenly welcomed them, embracing them in the way I missed embracing Lizzie.
Last but not least in the line of hugs and greetings was Michelangelo.
As the others scattered toward the leftovers their father had scavenged in their absence, the young Michel curled into his rat-father's arms and looked up to him.
"What is this, Michelangelo?" the rat questioned with an adoring laugh.
"I think I made a friend today," he whispered.
I smiled knowingly, watching through the cracks of my little glass box.
I thought I had, too.
Lizzie, taught through experience, ignored her father's slurs as she entered the house. She did not look around for me, she had stopped doing so nearly a week beforehand. She knew better. She had always been a smart girl.
Into her room she went. There she closed the door.
She would sit in her room, doing the coloring sheets and addition tables that her school teachers had given her. There she was sheltered from the world, within her square room.
From time to time, she would glance out toward the beams of light that sparingly broke through the glass window of her room. There she would wonder what life could have been like outside of her square room.
The thoughts would end there and she would continue working, attempting to please the instructors she relied upon so much.
Just like her mother.
MySynonym: A special thank you to the supportive reviews last chapter. It meant so very much to me! I've never done anything like this and it meant a lot to get that support. Thank you!