purge

She pulled into the driveway next to the old yellow station wagon. A familiar feeling of dread came over her as she rested both hands on the steering wheel and sat staring at the small white paint-chipped house in front of her. The house that was once bright, well manicured and full of life. The house that held a childhood of memories, ranging from the joyously good to the depressingly bad. Images flowed through her mind like a quick slideshow. Her and her best friend running through the lush green grass and sliding head first onto the slip-and-slide. The morning she tried to make her parents breakfast in bed, only to catch the old green toaster on fire and woke them up with a shrieking smoke alarm instead. Evenings spent popping popcorn, making milkshakes and sitting down to watch Wrestlemania, while her mother groaned and her father rubbed his hands together in excitement. Those memories dissolved into the later years. The years of yelling, crying, and slammed doors. Her smile quickly faded.

She slowly got out of her car looking around. Time had not been kind to her neighborhood. It was located in the older part of town. Once a neighborhood filled with the sound of children laughing, weed eaters weeding and retirees pushing their pecan rollers on the ground, was now littered with the sound of cars bumping their bass, children crying and a couple yelling down the road. She walked up the cracked sidewalk to the tattered screen door. She remembered when she had accidently fallen and pushed the corner of the screen out of it’s frame. It had been years ago and time had succeeded in dislodging more of it so that it now looked like a large turned down page of a book. Fitting, perhaps.

She put her key into the lock and took a deep breath. This was not her life anymore. She knew that, yet still she could feel the dread rising, causing her breath to become short and a lump start to form in her throat. She reminded herself that she had successfully escaped this place. That it was just a chapter of her life. A chapter that served to remind her what can happen when people stop trying. A cautionary tale on giving up and checking out. The all-too-familiar snapshot of a family unraveling. Taking another deep breath she turned the key, braced herself for the overwhelming feeling of despair and walked in.