Prologue:
I was born in Sleepy Valley, California in the United States in 1985 to Mario Félix and Luciana Félix. Ever since I was a child, life was complicated. Mom was volatile, cruel, and often violent to both my father and I. My father was too busy tending to his own emotional and physical wounds, that he neglected to tend to mine. So, I had to look out for myself. This went on for years, until I turned eight years old. Mom divorced my father, saying she was tired of being tied down and held back by us. Then she was gone. She wasn’t gone soon enough in my opinion.
But to dad it was another story. He could not cope with the absence of the only woman he ever loved. So, he drank. He drank until he could no longer feel, until nothing mattered, not even me. Even at that young age, I knew he was not capable of being a father. He was like me, broken by a lifetime of abuse. So, I took over most of his responsibilities. I cooked, cleaned, and made sure he paid the bills, but no matter how much I did, dad could not climb out of the deep pit of despair he was in. Over the years, I cleaned less and less, no matter how much I tried to tidy, the air was thick with the sour scent of stale beer.
I despised alcohol. I blamed it for my dad’s condition, but eventually when I turned sixteen, I started drinking. And finally, I understood my father. Why be sober when all the bad feelings washed away with just a few beers?
Despite my newfound drinking habit, I was doing excellent in school. I was at the top of my class, and I had big aspirations. As a child, I found comfort in movies. I especially loved horror because no matter how bad my day was going, you could guarantee that people in horror movies were having a worse day, so from a very early age, I had decided I would become a filmmaker.
I wanted to escape my life; I wanted to forge a brand-new path for myself away from my parents and everything that had held me down in life and I had the determination to accomplish it. Until…I met him.
I thought my life was bad as it was, what I didn’t know was that it was about to get much worse.
