They say I’m lucky to be here. Boarding school. Safe. Fed. Books in my hands, a roof that doesn’t leak. But luck feels like a cruel joke when you cry in a bed no one tucked you into.
My stepmom’s voice doesn’t need to travel far— it lives in me now. “You’re too much.” “You ruin everything.” “No wonder your mother left.” And I hate how fast I believe her. How deep those words go.
Because my real mum did leave. Not by accident. Not by death. She left because she didn’t want to be a mum. Not my mum. Not with me in the picture. Fifteen years old and I still wonder what it was about me that made her walk away.
Was I born too loud? Too soft? Too inconvenient to keep?
She sends postcards sometimes. From places I’ve never been. Smiling in sunglasses, signing with love like she remembers what that means. But love doesn’t show up twice a year and forget your birthday.
So I sit here, in classrooms where no one knows why I flinch at kindness, why I don't raise my hand. They don’t see the girl who keeps herself small so she won’t be sent away again.
I imagine the van sometimes— that guy with the dog and the dust roads. I imagine running, not toward something, but away. From the house that wasn’t mine. From the voice that broke me. From the silence my mother left behind.
But what if I never run? What if I just grow older and colder, wearing a mask that looks like success but feels like surviving?
What if I stay here— the girl left behind twice, too scared to dream, too used to being unwanted to believe she could ever be more?
What if I don’t make it— and no one notices because they never expected me to in the first place?
a part two sadder piece to Van Man by the girl who still asks to go to the bathroom & sometimes i wish i could attach photos to my poems