Story Night

So there's a story night things with friends coming up.  Maybe I'll go, and if I do this will be the story that I tell:

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There's this little girl I know.  She's about 9 or 10.  She comes from a perfect little Christian family...  or so people think.  She knows that she's a little different from everybody else.  She doesn't know how, but she knows that people treat her differently.  Her teachers neglect her, her friends, if you can call them that, tease her, her dad abuses her, and her mom ignores her.  Even her church friends bully and make fun of her.  She thought church was supposed to be better.  She was even raped there once.  Of course she never told anybody.  But everything else she told her dad, and he said, 'That's just what friends do to each other.  Just go along with it and laugh.'  But she never did laugh.  It never felt right to laugh.  She didn't know what to do or how to get help.  Once she tried to ask her school teacher for help.  As a class assignment, she wrote about what happened over the weekend at her house.  She wrote about how her dad beat her mom and landed in jail overnight.  But without even reading it, her teacher said that if she didn't want to share this to the class, she shouldn't write about it.  So she erased everything and made up a silly story about being happy at a park.  One day she just couldn't take anymore of this pain and hurt so she got a pencil and paper and started a letter to her friends.

'Dear Cathy and Rita,
I'm going to go away forever.  Please don't come looking for me.  I leave you with my favorite teddy bear and erasers.'

She took the paper, folded it, and put it in an envelope.  She didn't know her friends' addresses, so she just wrote their names on the envelope and left it on her desk, where anyone could easily see it.  Then she went to the kitchen and looked at the knives.

She didn't actually leave though.  She felt like she didn't have enough courage.

She's much older now, and living happily.  All the pain and suffering is gone, and she's living a wonderfully new life now.  Just kidding.  There's no such thing as happy ever after.  That's just the face she puts on for others to see.

She's much older now, but she still bears all the scars of her childhood.  They say that time heals all wounds.  She's not so sure about that.  Wounds leave scars, and she has a lot of those.  Both emotional and physical. There are days when she can't help but relive those nightmares over and over.  Some days are good.  Some days are bad.  But time might heal all wounds, you never know.  So she waits.