Madness

24

24| Question and Answer

It's my birthday tomorrow. I was as excited for the day as I am every year.

Which is not excited at all.

I hate my birthday.

I don't care about my birthday. When I was younger in elementary school, I would always see everyone get so many presents for their birthdays and I used to wonder why mom never got me anything.

Every time I asked, she always brushed it off saying that it was bad luck to get presents on your birthday. So I believed her.

As I got older, I realized that we were too broke to get me anything anyway. I wasn't mad about it, because by then I had already learned to not expect anything. I learned to disregard my birthday.

Then, David came into our lives.

I didn't care about my birthday before, but after what he did to me, I loathed my birthday.

It didn't help the fact that I was going back to school tomorrow. My birthday had to land on a fucking Monday. It's as if the universe is trying to punish me.

Haven't I been punished enough?

Caledon and Donatello have attempted to apologize to me, but I didn't care. They would stand outside my bedroom door for hours at a time, talking and blabbering about how they didn't mean what they said.

I can understand the fact that all of them have faced trauma in their lives. I can live with that. I cannot understand why they thought verbally insulting my character was going to justify their trauma and not mine.

Enzo tried to de-escalate the situation, but I didn't care to listen. It was tense between everyone, and knowing that I was the cause of that tension made me hate myself just a little bit more than I usually did.

That didn't change anything though. I was beginning to trust these people, my brothers. I was allowing myself to get comfortable, only for them to stab me in the back.

Exactly like David did.

I'm not good enough for anyone. Not even my own blood.

It's despicable.

+++

I was scrolling through youtube my phone in the living room when Donatello and Marcus plopped down beside me.

I ignored them and continued scrolling through possible videos to watch.

"Aurora, what do you want for your birthday tomorrow?" Marcus asked me. I glanced at him quickly before looking back at my phone.

I didn't answer him, because there wasn't anything in particular that I wanted.

"Rora, we're talking to you," Donatello bumped his shoulder with mine. I ignored him, once again.

Both of them shared a look, but I didn't pay any attention to that. "What do you want for lunch?" Donatello asked me.

"I'm not hungry," I said as I clicked on a Pewdiepie video. They both kept asking me random questions, all of which I gave one-word answers too.

I'm just tired. I always want to sleep, and if I'm out of bed, I'm sitting at my desk or on the couch. I don't have enough energy to actively talk to anyone, and most of the time I can feel myself dozing off whenever someone tries to talk to me.

By someone, I mean any one of my brothers. Turi seems really sensitive about my antisocial behaviour, so I try and say small sentences to him, but it's hard. I feel exhausted when I try to talk a lot. I don't want to talk a lot.