Where I Really Belong
Sometimes I like to hide, like hide from the world. When I was a kid, I used to play hide-and-seek, and I was really good at it. Everyone would search for hours, and then eventually give up and go home. The truth is I always hid in the same place, under the bed.
When those kids went home, they ate supper. Their moms would pile the food on their plates, and scold them until they ate their vegetables. On Sundays, the entire family would gather around the old wood table, to eat supper together. The parent’s would ask their children about life, but the children would never tell. Even when cleaning up, they would all do it together.
At my house, I always sat alone at the old card table. On the days my dad remembered he had a kid, he would leave me a sandwich. Even on Sundays, I sat alone at the card table, picking at my cold lettuce sandwich. My mother never piled food on my plate, or scolded me. The truth is I never knew her.
My mother ran away when I was little. At least that’s what they told me. I was raised by my father. But I never actually see his face anymore. He worked at Burger King, flipping burgers for minimum wage. After work, he went to relax at the bar. He stayed there for hours on end. When I was younger, he used to take me to work, setting me on the counter and singing along with the radio while he flipped burgers. My father was a different man when I was younger. We used to dance to the jazz music that played in our house. We used to play pillow fort, and princesses. I even crowned my dad a knight. But then something happened to the man I knew when I was younger. He just vanished for months and left me at an aunt’s house.
He came back three years later. He said it was a just breather and that he needed some time alone. He told me we were moving to a better town. I told him anywhere but Anita, Indiana. Two weeks later we packed bags, and said goodbye to the only home we ever knew.
That’s how I ended up in a place where I had no friends at school and nothing to do but sit. I literally started to hide, again, but this time in plain sight. My father quit his job, and started hanging out in the bar more often, coming home dead drunk. We started falling behind on bills, so I quit school. My father no longer cared about anyone, but I still had to take care of him. So I picked up a couple of shifts at a restaurant, and started to make money.
  Then one day when I went to the back, to deposit money, I was hit with the most disappointing surprise of my life. All the money I had saved up was gone. I was in the deep end. The lady at the desk told me that a man claiming himself as my father emptied the contents in my bank account. I ran home, with my heart thudding. As I turned on the corner, I saw that the car was gone. I swung open the front door, to see that all my father’s things were gone. He had left me too. I sat on the ground and cried. All the money I had saved up was gone, and my liar-of-a-father was as well.
It took me weeks to pull myself together. I moved houses, and decide to stay with my only friend, Emily. We worked hours together at the restaurant wiping tables side by side. We never talked until the week before my father left. She was great. Her family seemed so much like the cliché I never lived. When I broke the news to her that I was abandoned, she immediately hurried me to her house and gave me a room. She gave me a place in her life. She had two other siblings. A younger sister named Allie, and an older brother named Shane. I lived my share of a cliché life through her family. We ate Sunday brunch together, went to church together, and I even got asked about my life. Emily and I, being the same age, became very close. We gossiped, painted out nails, worked together at the restaurant efficiently. Her parents even offered to pay my college tuition. I turned down the offer, because I had enough money, from waitressing, to pay my way through college. I wanted to get far away from the place where everything bad in my life happened. I applied at colleges in California. I got into one, San Jose University.
I was okay with anything. The following fall I started college, majoring in accounting. I was happy with my new life, and Emily still kept in touch. I finished college and went back to the place where everything had started.
Lying under that bed where I used to hide and cry, is where I end this story, a decade later. The most important thing to realize in a person is where you belong. And I know my home is right here under this bed where everything began, for the best.