What is the hardest decision you have ever been asked to make?  Take thirty seconds to think.  Did you find it?  I did.  I don’t even have to be given time.  It is always there, overshadowing everything in both my sub and conscious mind.  A memory almost as horrible as it is hopeless.  A recollection inseparably entangled within the hidden memories of my mind. 

            I do not remember how old I was but know I was young.  I am guessing between the ages of four and six.  My brother was younger, and my sister was older, I am the middle.

            Some of you may be familiar and understand the never-ending fights and yelling and throwing and abuse of, at, or with things and people, some of you…… just be happy you were not blessed upon this path at birth.

            I was tiny.  My dad had just been kicked out of the military for drug use after which my parents decided to move us into the Middle of The Woods Alaska; I assume they did this so no neighbors would hear the nonstop fighting or discover their numerous grow operations while also allowing us offspring to run wild raising ourselves.

One day my parents were fighting.  I do not remember if this fight was any better or worse. After so many they all become the same thing, just another fight. This fight, however, took a noticeable turn for the ugly when my mother was suddenly brandishing a 45-caliber pistol in one of her hands.  She then took my brother, sister and I, sitting us on our black, rubbed raw, fake leather sofa in a row, side by side, shoulder to shoulder.  She. Her, that women began pointing the gun from one of our heads to the next asking “Who should go first?  Which one of you little fuckers should I shoot first?”

This mom, this woman, this light of my life that should have fought to protect and cherish me out of pure motherly instinct alone. No, this monster of a mother was asking who she should be executing first.

I am no philosopher or mathematician, but the relativity of space and time most certainly does exist.  I do not remember how long this regurgitated and all to often pondered upon memory took to happen at that actual moment in time but the space it takes up in my mind feels as if it were years, upon years, upon years.  Perhaps I was a child aging beyond time in but one day, one action, one fight, while not even realizing it.  I was vulnerable and young, but was my reality?

            Today the memory of my selfish instincts haunts me. I wish I could say that I stood up, puffed out my tiny chest valiantly and volunteered my life for that of my brother and sister, but life is not like story books of times past.  My very first impulse was that I do not want to die.  My first thought was that I do not want my brother or sister to die either.

            I do not remember what happened from here, but all three of us black sheep kids are still alive.  When I think back I do not see that woman, that mother, that monster, that me. I see a hollow pit of a soul.  A face as lightless as coal with her black hole of a mouth open as heavenly silver tear drops seep forth from her eyes.  I do not see I women, I see incurable sadness.  I see me and the emptiness inside.