I grew up not exactly like the kids around me but, to be honest, some parts i wouldn't change but, some parts i sometimes want to erase, at least from my memory.

Let me set the picture for you.

Big city. And i lived in the center of it.

The house i grew up in, or better said, the mansion was the property of the State. It was big, old and somehow it always gave off a strange feeling.

This property was separated per families, each family living in some part of the house. To be honest i never understood how someone managed to transform that mansion into several....apartments, yeah, lets call them that. There were a total of 9 apartments. The families living in them had to pay a monthly rent to the City Hall, rent that was, as i found out later on in my life, was actually lower than any other type of rent in the whole city. Why is the price important you may ask? Well, it will make a lot of sense later on, so keep this detail in mind.

To get a better understanding, picture this: you take a right from the main street. On your right side, you pass fancy boutiques, a small convenience store and some apartment buildings. On the left, you pass a hotel and some old houses.

You stop.

In front of you, the street continues. Looking to your left, you see a 20 stories high building, that seems new and abandoned at the same time, which is next to a Catholic church and of course another road. Looking the opposite way, there are two mansions that look like they are on the verge of collapsing, one worst than the other. You instinctively pick number two and slowly make your way through the old, rusty gates. The concrete fence, with parts falling off of it and graffiti scattered all over, feels like its separating that yard from the rest of the world.

Now, you're in front of the massive building, some of its parts falling apart in the corners, it looks like nobody is living there. You see two doors, one of them is big and tall, decorated with spirals at the edges, fully opened. The other one is smaller and. There is actually no door, its just a doorway and behind it its another door, covered by big planks of wood. You decide and go through the doorway of the second one. You find yourself in the middle of a hallway spreading from you right to your left. The right side its cut off by a modern style door. The left side has an old door, half closed with broken windows and a curtain, clogged with dust. Looking through that door, the hallway seems to go nowhere. Its just too dark to see, but you slowly pace ahead, with your hands stretched in front of you. Suddenly you hit another door and you push it open, taking a step forward. A light shines brightly out of nowhere. You look around yourself, you are now in a massive oval hallway. There are three doors and in between them there are wood planks scattered and leaned on the walls.

While curiosity and surprise lifts off of your mind, screams and loud noises can be heard from behind one of the doors. You get closer to it and right when you get in front of it, the door slams open and a short woman rushes outside, walking out through the hallway you just came in.

Another rush of curiosity pushes you to look through the now open door. you see rugs all over the floor. An old stove and a washing machine, behind it, massive windows covered with pieces of material, give of some light. The sound of women shouting comes from inside, then a shouting manly voice shakes up your whole body, then...silence. Taking the opportunity, you get through the doorway and enter the room. Its big, three meters high and the dimension of a basketball court. At a table, in the middle of the room, you see the boy whose voice you heard just a few seconds ago. He's chewing angrily on some food. A couch is placed right across the table, you take a sit on it, a woman starts shouting again, while another one grumbles something unrecognisable. You get startled by the sound of a punch hitting a wooden surface. the boy shouts again. You stand up and rush to the other room. Surprised, you stop at the sight of an old lady, sitting to your right, on a bed and holding a walking stick in between her hands. She looks tired, her brown eyes staring into nothing. At the back of the room is another bed. A woman paces the length of the bed, shouting curses and crying. Getting closer to her, it becomes clear that there is someone in the bed. A small figure lays under the covers.

Confused, you take a sit on the bed. A second after, the covers move, revealing a small girl's body. Headphones in her ears. Her eyes puffy, clearly from crying. She looks at the two women, seeing that they are now arguing again, she shakes her shoulders. She takes one last glance at the whole room, stoping on you for a second.

Green eyes covered in tears seem to look for something but, before you have a chance to react, she goes under the covers again.

With this, you quickly rush to the exit, passing those people, then onto the hallway, then outside. It seems easier to leave than it was to come. The air hits your face as you walk towards the front gates.

The atmosphere of that house lingers in the back of your head. Now you understand what lies beneath the covers of my mind.

Unspoken, dammed and traumatizing imagines of fights, easily thrown curses and hatred, were main ingredients in the way i grew up. No much for the gestures of affection or kind words. Did it define me? No. I cannot say that it not have an important influence on the way i grew up and the way i am today, but i did not let my mind to soak up all of that.

Family equals identity

My mother always said "Blood can never be turned into water", which translates into the idea that family comes first no matter what happens. I used to hate this idea, I always wished I would have been born into another family or simply put, to never be born at all. As time passed, I have come to understand the meaning of that sentence more and more. Now I think that, yes, blood can never be turned into water, but when mature enough, people can decide if they either want to embrace it or reject it. As big as my family is, they've all been separated so much throughout generations, that it became a tradition. Hate, jealousy and the strive for money and power became their legacy. That, from both my father's family and my mother's, could be seen from a distance. It put a stamp on us, on me, that felt and feels like a tattoo. I was always known as the poor but smart and shy girl by the people that knew my family, for the rest of the world, I always had different words attached to my image.

Nonetheless, my family had a terrible illness: Terror  of What Others Might Think. An illness that was meant to put restraints on what I do, think and say but never actually affected the rest of my family. Growing up in this family has thought me a lot. I did not always understand and i've always blamed destiny for everything, partly because I grew up with a mother that never accepted her own mistakes and partly because I got used to the idea that I could never change who I am because I was the result of decisions taken by higher forces. Let me get to the beginning of this, but hang on, it will be a long story. Like any other family, mine was separated into two main branches: one from my mother and one from my father.

My mother's family came from a major branch of people that were initially born and raised in the countryside but with generations ended up in the capital of the country. My father's family. on the other hand, mostly from what he told me, came from Greece. I don't know why they came and why they decided to stop here, frankly, they were long dead before I was born. Both families had their own amazing stories in my opinion, The D.-C. family(my mother's family) had and still has many major ideas, morals, contradictions, etc. that I do not stand for and I never will. Morality, as I came to understand it, did not actually matter or made sense. My grandfather was a raging womenizer and an alcoholic who did not actually know how to love his family but admitted his mistakes in his last moments.That's how much I know about him since he died when I was a baby. My grandmother on the other hand, was not perfect, but close to. She was an orphan and grew up with other 4 brothers and a sister in a small rural part of this country, raised by her grandmother. She was hard working, smart and kind. This two grandparents had two kids, two daughters, my mother being the young one. These girls grew up to have one kid each, but we'll get to that later.

The reason I say I do not stand for their "way" of living is due to growing up emotionally incapacitated. The only one with whom I made a true connection with and who touched my soul, was my grandmother. My mother, i'm gonna call her Steph, was a young mother, she had me when she was only 19 years old, so she just struggled and struggled to make money to raise me, as well as trying over and over again to find a man. With this said, Steph never came to actually embrace motherhood and never made a sincere and pure connection with me. From this it resulted into me forming myself on my own, using my family only as examples of what I want or don't want to do. I could never relate to them, I could never feel as part of the family and this is something that I could never tell them as I grew up.

The other important part of my identity were the I. family, I can't say I know much about them, most of them where dead before I was born and others died when I was too little to fully comprehend their loss. Exactly as it happened in the other family, the D.-C.s, there was only one person who established a connection to me, that being my father's uncle, who I considered and I will always consider my grandfather. From what I heard, he was a lonely alcoholic, but he was not dangerous when he drank and he was never treating me or my mother disrespectfully. I only remember him as kind and funny. My father, on the other hand, was distant, reluctant and he mostly acted as he couldn't care less about anything. Alcohol and women were his most preferred activities. Even before I was born and to this day, I know this man, Alex, never knew and was never ready for a child, most importantly, for a daughter.

That being said, now I can start to lay down everything that I experienced being born into this family and raised the way I was.

I have to be blunt, at least here, for my dark, scared, desperate self, I have to.

I never thought my life story was worth telling or writing about, mostly because my stories became a repetitive sound in my head as I told them over and over again to people who I was close to or with whom, in time, I became close.

Now you may be wondering, what made me do it. That's a really good question and the answer is "refuge". Writing became my closest friend and my healing at the same time. I just can't ditch it.

For the people who encouraged me to "start writing already", I want to share my stories, the way I experience them now or have experienced them when I was younger, I want my older self to be able to relieve those moments and to get unlimited moments of nostalgia.