Sunset

I used to spend hours outside. I never really enjoyed it, but that is how I spent years of my life after school during middle school. This was long before I discovered that extra-curricular activities would provide a much more efficient way for me to avoid my mother.

There are spots out behind the barn where I used to throw dirt, sit on hay, and just talk to myself. Sometimes I would talk to God. I still remembered the closeness I had felt with God during fifth grade and I held onto hope that he would come with my salvation.

If I went back inside I would only be yelled at, so I stayed outside. Sometimes I would make up chores that required me to be outside, simply so that I would have an excuse to be outside. I was always in the backyard, and sometimes I could feel her eyes watching me as I cleaned out horse stalls or played with Dominic on the trampoline. I tried to keep my brothers outside the house for as long as I could making up every game I could think of just so that we were all safe together away from her wrath. Eventually Dominic and Ben would grow tired or cold and would go inside to homework or to their video games. I would stay outside.

I was alone in my suffering, and I knew that. I would brainstorm games for the next day, dream about my life in the future, and try to decide whether or not I should tell someone what I was going through. Patting Stormy on the nose I knew that I was not completely alone all the time, I had my animals. After we got Billy, when he still liked me, I would run around the barn letting him chase after me, and then I would turn and run back after him. A sort of tag, only we never touched and it was simply running. I was free. I played this same game with the horses sometimes, but they did not like as much as that goat did.

By eighth grade I was still hanging around out back learning how to jump from hay bail to hay bail and pretending to be a Pokemon whenever Dominic called upon me to play with him. I would be a puppy, Pikachu, anything that Dominic wanted as long as we stayed outside on that tramp. I began to "come up with the best games" just to keep him interested. While I was looking out for Dominic, what he did not know was that he was looking out for me by keeping me away from Mom.

Whenever it finally got dark I would turn on the barn lights and work on something inside the stalls. Sometimes when it was so cold my hands were going numb, I would close up the barn doors and sit inside where the wind could not reach me. Whenever this happened, if I had not cleaned out the stall recently I would sit inhaling the urine smell that drifted up from the shavings inside the stalls.

Eventually I would be called inside on account of the cold, the darkness, or because dinner was ready. Occasionally I would just get tired and head inside to start homework where my Mom was either ready to be angry at me for staying outside and not doing my chores inside, or was asleep upstairs and I could change my clothes, grab a bite, do some math, then head to bed.

I was very scared of her. So scared that sitting outside bored out of my mind was better than being inside where she could decide to do anything with me.