I could literally just... start over. I can get in my car and drive as far as I can. I can get a job in a different state and move there. I can struggle and fight but be free. I could take the few animals that are actually mine under my care and leave. The thought of them being happier while not having an actual home but being with me, who doesn't berate or yell or shoot them with a bb gun just for yowling when they haven't been fed, it's...
I could go to Tennessee. I could go to my hometown, live with my father or my aunts or uncles and be happy there. Sure, my father has a... family, I have a younger brother who doesn't know me, but... I miss my father. I miss the trips we'd take to see him, even if they were at my request because my younger brother was too young to really... care.
I could leave. But... I can't. Not really. Not when there are animals to take care of and a younger brother to watch and a sink full of dishes to do.
When I was younger, about mid-way through the catastrophe that was the divorce, I was friends with a girl. She was the only girl out of her two siblings. The middle child, too. We... had a lot more in common than I realized at the time. I snuck out of my trailer to go hang out with her in the dead of night, we'd sit in the ditch by the highway and rant and rave about all of the things two middle schoolers had to deal with- well.. the unfairness of what we were going through. Only daughters. Middle children. Responsibilities that kept piling, and piling, and piling up.
She had it worse than me, I think. Sure, my parents were mid-way through fighting and I'd have to chase after my dad for him to talk through his emotions and... tell his barely ten year old daughter about how much my mother frustrates him but! She, my friend, had... so many more lives on her shoulders. I never saw her dad, but I knew her mother and grandmother well. I knew they loved animals. I knew they had already started their own mini-farm in the backyard. I knew there was a weight on her daughter's shoulders as she showed me the new chicks they got, hatched from older hens. I could tell by her sighing when she showed me the ducks, as she explained on and on about how snakes had recently gotten into the pen, and how sad it was when she'd found a dead chicken that morning.
We went inside and watched tv afterwards.
I could leave, for my own sanity, but even then I'd be lost. Free, I guess, but lost. I wonder where she is now? I got ripped away from her, just as I had my hometown.
I never got to keep in touch.