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Before I start I'd like to say thank you to my future readers, I'd appreciate it if you gave me a follow and left comments.Lets get started. Chapter One: Before It All Changed
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I could smell thegarlic as my mother hummed in the kitchen, stirring the pot with slow, careful movements. The fire in the hearth crackled softly, casting warm shadows on the walls, and the little home we had felt cozy despite its simple nature. I sat on the small wooden stool by the door, sketching with the charcoal I’d stolen from my father’s workshop earlier. He never minded. He always encouraged my drawings, calling them “visions of tomorrow.”
It was a ritual—my father working hard in the yard, repairing tools or carving wood, while I drew, my mother humming as she worked. My parents might not have been wealthy, but they worked with everything they had to create a life for us. I watched them, learning from their steadiness, from their silent hope that even with everything stacked against them, life would go on.
I wasn’t blind to our struggles. The ragged clothes, the meager meals, the dust that settled on everything because we couldn’t afford to sweep as often as I wished. I knew we were poor. But I didn’t feel it. Not as long as we had each other.
Mother’s face was a picture of contentment as she leaned over, brushing my hair away from my face with a soft laugh.
“You’re always drawing, Iris,” she said, voice lilting with affection. “Do you ever dream of something more than this?”
I smiled up at her, not fully understanding her question. “I dream of the sky.”
She blinked in surprise, brushing a little dirt from my cheek. “The sky?”
I nodded. “When I close my eyes, I picture it. So big, and full of stars.” It felt silly now, but those stars felt like a dream in themselves—bright spots in a dark world.
“Your father says that no matter how small we are, as long as we hold our heads high, no one can stop us from reaching those stars,” she said, bending down to place a gentle kiss on my forehead. Her lips were warm, full of love.
But as I looked out the small, grimy window at the dusky sky, I wasn’t sure if the stars were real or just a story. Was there more out there? Was there a bigger life waiting for me, or was this it?
The days came and went. I learned quickly, as children do, to hold my head high. Not that anyone had told me to do so—but because I knew that no matter how hungry we were, how few luxuries we had, the life we had was still precious. It wasn’t a grand life. It wasn’t a perfect life. But it was mine.
And then they got sick.
I remember it as if the memory has been stitched together, filled with fraying threads and moments lost in a fog of panic and sorrow. The coughing fits, the fevered sweats, the shaking hands that once gripped mine so confidently. In their bed, one night, my mother stared at the ceiling, her eyes distant.
“Don’t cry for me, Iris,” she said, trying to smile through the exhaustion. “Promise me you’ll remember, no matter what happens.”
I didn’t understand. I couldn’t understand how a sickness could undo everything, how it could steal their strength so quickly. I remember thinking I could fix it, that I would find a cure, bring something back into the world of dark moments, but it wasn’t enough. There was never enough.
There came the quiet night when I was told they were gone. My body felt frozen, but my mind—my mind raged against it all. What was I supposed to do with all the dreams they had left behind? What was I supposed to do with the space that expanded in my chest, taking away the air?
But no one told me that my life was ending too.
In the days that followed, social services came. It’s funny, isn’t it? How quickly your life changes, like when a leaf drifts away from its tree, carried by some unseen force, unaware of what’s next. I wasn’t allowed to see them anymore. I wasn’t allowed to keep their things.
I still remember their voices in my head as the worker came in. My father's rough whisper, his always-worried words: You need to survive. You need to thrive. You can do it. And then my mother, her bright voice telling me to not just get through the world, but to conquer it.
Conquer it. CONQUER IT.
A laugh burst from my chest. It wasn’t a real laugh. Not then. Not now. It was more a bitter escape, a tiny hole through the deep press of grief.
The orphanage wasn’t like they said it would be in the pamphlets. It was loud. It was dirty. It was crowded and cold. There were other kids there, too many of them. They eyed me like they could see through my soul. I knew how they felt—their eyes followed my every step, the way they had followed my parents' backs when they'd walked away. Those eyes felt sharp, probing.
But no one was here to protect me, and I quickly learned to blend in with the crowd, to lose myself within the pack of kids all trying to figure out their place. There was an urgency there, one I had never been taught to feel before. It was a different kind of game.
At first, I cried at night. I would hug my knees to my chest in the dark of my small cot, listening to the echo of unfamiliar voices. I didn’t understand the rules of this place. It wasn’t like when my parents were alive and the world felt small, warm, and certain. Now, the room I slept in felt too big. And cold. The dreams I had once painted were fading, swallowed by the new weight that pressed on my chest every day.
In a place where no one belonged, I tried to fight to still belong to something.
But before long, that fight turned into something darker. Something I didn’t have words for.
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❤️❤️❤️❤️. Still getting used to everything, I'm more used to Wattpad but I'll get used to it. Take care of yourself
