Writing Gives Me Air

Writing gives me air.

When I was one and half years old, my mother and I came to America from Russia, leaving my father behind due to visa issues. I wouldn’t see my father for the next seven years. My mother and I lived with my grandparents, and I grew up watching my mother work tirelessly in order to support my grandparents, my father, who was now in Nepal, and I. I grew up listening to my grandparents and extended family tell my mother that she was too young, too pretty to wait for a man who would never make it to America, but my mother never listened; instead she told me epic stories of my father and her, and the things they went through together that I’d only seen and heard in movies or on television. How they’d escaped from really bad people, how my father was taken for a week and had his jaw broken for money, how we once almost froze in the streets of Moscow because we were locked out of the place we were staying and so on and so forth. Listening to my mother, and later my father who would confirm, convinced me that I would one day tell their story… that I had to.

With the absence of my father and my mother working more and more, I was left with two oblivious grandparents and my thoughts. So, I began creating a world of my own. I created characters and premises that allowed me to escape and cope with a life I’d yet to understand.

Fast forward to when I was eight years old. My family was together again; my grandparents had moved on, life seemed promising. My parents were more in love than ever, and never failed to flaunt it, but something changed when my brother was born the following year. My mother fell into post-partum depression, and my father brought his anger from work home. He became distant, angry, and impatient, especially with my mother. As the years went on, their flaring love dimmed. My parents only communicated through yelling and my mother suspected an affair, a suspicion that has yet to be proved but has become a fact to my mother.

As the years went on, I became a parental figure to my brother and a mediator for my parents. I learned to never cry in front of my brother, to always be strong when I stopped a fight in the middle of the night and to just keep pushing forward.

Externally, I kept a happy smile, made others laugh and pretended like everything was normal.

But internally, I was dying. I wanted to scream, I wanted to cry and shout, but no one could hear me. It felt like I was constantly holding my breath.

So, I did the only thing I knew how, I wrote, well actually, I write.

I take my laptop, open an empty doc and fill the empty space with words, and somehow I can breath again.