As I type this post, I am moving my back up against my futon, looking quite peculiar, I'm sure. I have been eaten by bugs, not nearly as bad as I have been before, but as bad as you can be in a mile walk at 10pm.

The problem with telling people how you feel is, unlike the school counselor who always provides insightful perspective and never becomes short-tempered, they have a choice of how to respond. Even if you are sobbing, and your heart is broken, these people have a choice to be insensitive.

This evening, as my mom picked me up from the library and we began to make conversation on the ride home, my sister came up as a topic. If you happen to know anything about me, or have read earlier posts, you'll know that my relationship with my sister, second only to my relationship with my mom, is the most broken relationship I've ever seen. It pains me so deeply, and never ceases to, no matter the circumstance. As the conversation took a turn and became a little more deeper, this once more arose... my problem with me sister, or, rather, her problem with me. I shared with my mother what I hoped she would have known in my fifteen years of life. My sister's emotionally murderous remarks, threats, words and more importantly, actions. When we finally stopped at Harris Teeter, where my mom was stopping to pick up some groceries, she exited the car without slightest sign of hearing a word. She rounded the small SUV and opened one of the back doors and lifted her purse over her shoulder. "Are you mad at me?" The words fell out of my mouth before I could stop them.

"I don't know. I'm just tired of hearing the same old thing, over and over again. I'm so tired of it." At this moment, I should have just slid out of my seat and walked home. Instead, I sat and waited, in the heat of a car without open windows or AC, a car as still and immovable, as determined as my mother's mind. She returned and began to spit out words quickly, asking questions, but not really asking, instead just wanting to put me in my place, put me back in the playpen, back where the only sounds I could make were safe, positive ones  "ma", "pa", "gah." She asked what my plan was and I said, wearily, I was done trying. This was quickly rebuked and she proclaimed to me how that relationship affects everyone. My last rational words were that she should take it up with my sister then. More retorts, more painted-white wooden stakes were driven into the ground, a picket fence that didn't mean a happy, American family at all, but instead a divided one. I had too much self-respect to listen to that, or maybe was too weak to hear the consequences of my own actions and said "You have NO compassion. Stop the car. I'm getting out. I don't ever want to talk to you."

I fled the car and walked onto the sidewalk, where my mother's car followed. I made a sharp turn and crossed the road, which she couldn't emulate. The little gold car drove past the intersection and stopped, her lights signalling traffic to go around. As I continued to walk straight, approaching my mother in her car, I heard her yell for me to get back in the car. I just repeated what I had said before, I don't want to talk to you. And off went the car, but mostly my mother, quickly and without hesitation, with ease and even seeming eager to do so.

One thing I was distinctly aware of was how many times I had done that exact same thing before: been left, emotionally, on the curb of a road, to walk home. In all of about the eight times I've just had to leave, out of sheer hurt and inability to exist under the same roof with those people and remain civil, not once have I been sought out. This was an acute awareness, that just seemed to be sharpened as I turned a corner and saw the back door of my house, shut, appearing to be a different world. The door is made of wood but felt like a thick, steel lock. The criss-crossing of the window panes of the upper half of the door screamed indifference, the wooden grain the same direction it had always been, no evidence of a missing daughter.

I came into my house, though it felt like a stranger's, like that of the people I petsit for, maybe even more unfamiliar. I heard the voices of my parents in the other room, and I knew they'd heard the door, though neither of us said a word to the other. Running upstairs and settling into the groove of the futon I'm still on now, someone texted me and asked if I'd done anything this summer. I knew my normal response: camp, the keys, and backpacking and whitewater canoeing trip (in chronological order). But instead, I altered it: camp and a backpacking and whitewater canoeing trip, what about you? I slid in a pair of earbuds after I sent the text, and turned my music up loud enough to not be able to hear my ceiling fan.

Bit by bit, even an unnoticeable amount, I built my window panes, the beginning of my door. It'll be wooden alright, but feel like thick steel. My door will be just a door to most of those, but to my family, the ones who fabricated wall after wall to keep me out, it'll be impassable. It'll look like aged wood, painted white with a friendly brass doorknob. But that doorknob, with its four-inch diameter, will be all it takes to keep us apart. It was all it took to take us back to the silence, the cold-shoulder; back to the start.