Family War

Everyone keeps telling me that it will be okay. But I'm sitting here listening to the arguments filling up our home and the thoughts are beginning to overwhelm me.

My hands are shaking and I can't help feeling like the world is ending once again. I try to shut my eyes in hopes that if I close them tight enough the thoughts will squeeze from my mind. But nothing works anymore.

The house is a battlefield littered with insults and accusations that were shot around like bullets. 

And it's funny because it seems like this house should be falling apart from the war that is being waged inside of it. But it's not. 

And maybe I'm insane but that's what makes me the most angry. I want the windows to shatter and the floorboards to crumble. I want the ceiling to fall down all around us. I want this home to break just like every one of us living in it are breaking. 

Yet, everything stays upright and I'm left still sitting on my bed, fists clenched, listening to the fire being spewed from their mouths.

They think we are fireproof because we are children and we "cannot understand." But we are being burned just as much as they are and it hurts. 

And later I know we will be sitting around the dining room table pretending not to see the 3rd degree burns that scar all of us. But memories will still hang above us like black smoke that cannot be aired out.