All That I Need

Episode 8

Lily’s POV

His body was on mine.

Touching me. His hands were all over my body, and he was inside me. Taking something of mine that he had no right to take…

I woke up, shaking and sweating like crazy. It was the third time that I had dreamt about that tonight. It seemed to be haunting me. It wouldn’t leave me alone.

I didn’t know why. He hadn’t actually raped me. I had gotten away before he could do anything like that. But the “what if’s” were haunting me.

What if he hadn’t hopped off me to get that condom?

What if I hadn’t have thought about kicking him?

What if he had forced himself inside of me?

But the thing that haunted me the most was the realisation that mum had gone through that exact experience. Except that she didn’t get away quick enough.

And I was the result. A thing to forever remind her of her awful experience. I existed because there were horrible people in this world. And my father was a rapist. Still a stranger to my mother, and especially me to this day.

My existence was a reminder that there were people in this world who went around harassing teenage girls and raping them just because they could. Taking their virginity from them at an age as young as 17. My head throbbed, as I thought about the fact that I really should have never existed. I didn’t belong in this world. I was never wanted in this world. This was a thought I had often. And it haunted me more than anything else in the world.

By the time my mum had realised she was pregnant; it was too late for an abortion. She had went to hell and back to have me. My birth wasn’t a happy one. No loving husband by her side while she had me, and no happy tears shed when she first held me. She was ashamed. Disgusted that the baby she was holding had the genes of the man who had raped her within her blood.

She had been given the choice of giving me up for adoption, but had turned it down, deciding that she didn’t want to put me through similar stressful experiences to what she had been through, as an adopted child herself.

I’d heard all the stories. Mum never held back, she never sugarcoated things. I knew how much I really wasn’t meant to exist. But she assured me that over time I had grown on her. She grew to love me. She wanted to give me a good life. She wanted to forget about how I came to be, and love me as a mother, the way she was never loved by a mother.

But that hadn’t worked out for her.

She was too traumatised after what had happened to her, and was sick with her pregnancy. So she took time off work. When she wouldn’t go back to work after a year, they fired her. They were better off hiring someone new than to hang on to someone who didn’t seem to be coming back any time soon.

Very soon, she didn’t have the money to pay for rent for her apartment, and got kicked out.

With no one to turn to, as her adoptive parents wanted nothing to do with her once she made the choice to move out and buy an apartment of her own, and nowhere to go, that’s when our lives on the street began.

I shook myself out of the thoughts that always haunted my mind, and rolled around to see the silhouette of my mum lying beside me.

I didn’t need to be thinking about these things. Life had finally turned out fine.

We had a shelter, a mattress, pillows and a blanket. And I was finally able to use pads to make my period sanitary. When we were living on the streets, it was a mess.

We were also eating proper food every day, and had bottles of water handy. And I was finally going to school. Life was good.

When I couldn’t get back to sleep after thirty minutes, I got up, and slid outside to go for a walk.

And I found myself stuck in my thoughts again as I walked along the dark streets.

The houses surrounding me were gorgeous, way more than what we had. Not that I didn’t appreciate the shelter we had managed to buy.

The expensive houses were full of people who had lived normal lives since they were born. They had always had shelter, food, jobs and clean water.

They didn’t understand how lucky they were.

I would have done anything to have a normal childhood.