My.Heart (♥).Is.Beating.For.You

I never really liked Virgina. I knew nothing otherwise, but I detested this small town.

This town is called Lawson. It's right smack-dab in the middle of the state. Nothing wonderful or exciting happens here.

For fifteen years, I have lived with my mother and my younger sister Lilly in a small apartment on Main Street in the middle of town. We lived across the street from thepharmacy and to the left of a Burger King.

The town was so small, in fact, that everything was crammed together in maybe a two square mile space squeezed between four much larger towns.

The nearest Wal-Mart was thirty miles away. The nearest shopping mall was nearly sixty.

My mother and sister and I made due with what we had because my father had never been any help to us.

Here's the deal with him:

His name is Joshua Allen. He's an alchoholic. He's a jailbird. And right now, he's in rehab for drug abuse.

My mother and father met when my mother was taking community college classes in West Virgina. They got married two weeks after my mother found out she was pregnant with me.

I was born nine months later. My parents moved in with my father's mother here in Virginia. We lived in their basement up until I was three.

The problems started when my dad's father, whom had divorced my grandmother several years earlier, went to New York and decided he was going to give my father the chance of his lifetime and make him a rich man.

Turns out, my great uncle and a couple of his buddies owned a marajuana field and my father was supposedly getting a cut of the family cash.

He left me, seven at the time, and my now pregnant mother alone in this cramped apartment we still live in today.

Another five months went by and he barely escaped arrest as he fled back to us after the business was raided by police.

After that, my mother and father fought almost constantly. He had turned to drinking and to whatever drugs he managed to smuggle out of New York.

He began to smoke around my pregnant mother. She was eight months pregnant and had already been told by the doctor to be more careful or she would lose the baby.

A man who had become addicted to drugs and alcohol didn't particulary like it when someone tried to take them away.

I was only seven and I didn't exactly know what to think. All I knew was my mother was afraid, so I was afraid too.

My mother got into the habit of locking herself in the bedroom when she was almost a week due and my father was in another one of his spells.

I became the force of his rage. I went to school the next day covered in bruises and with a black eye. I couldn't speak. I had learned not to speak, in fact. The social services worker was called and immediatly went to my house when the only words I could utter were, "I'm scared for Mommy..."

I remember this part as clear as crystal.

I remember going up to the door, which was cracked slightly, stepping inside and seeing the broken glass all over the floor and the blood spots staining the carpet.

I began to cry furiously.

We found my mother in the bathroom, her face and arms cut, and in labor.

My father had fled the state. He was caught three weeks later and put in jail.

But the biggest load of crap I have ever heard, in my whole life, is this:

He was released after only five years and put on probation when a claim was made that he was suffering from mental instability.

And off to rehab he went. Where he has been for all these years.

Poor Lilly, she never had a father.

When she was born, she was born prematurely and she had to stay in the hospital a month.

And she has been raised in this apartment, just as I have been, for six years.

And as for my mother, she won't dare mention our father to Lilly.