I struggled with the dirty sliding door that led out of my family’s new house. It sounds ridiculous calling it new, when you could tell the small farmhouse had to be at least seventy years old. As I steadily walked farther from the house, I could still hear the psychotic screaming from my father, fill the chill air. Moving halfway across America to the snowy waste land had been my father’s idea, but still somehow, he could yell at my mother about how it was her fault. The viscous wind picked, up cutting straight through my clothes. My shoulders tensed and my hands went numb, as I saw the first snowflake from the time I left my real home in beautiful North Carolina.

I set myself on an old wood swing, with only two medal posts holding it up. I would not dare swing on the antique. I looked up at the grey sky above me and shut my eyes tight. I felt a snow flake fall on my rosy cheek directly underneath my right eye. I felt the snowflake melt gliding sown my face. It landed on my lips. The lips that once smiled and laughed. I had never felt such a longing loneliness fall over me until that moment. It was a despair I could not even comprehend. I had been stripped of everything I had loved in one measly week and yet my father still yelled at the top of his lungs. I felt like a solid block of ice and my eyes burned, but I couldn’t subject myself to any more rage. I sat there letting tears rundown my face, knowing this was now my new life.