Ethan

 

About two weeks ago, Ethan told his mother than he wanted to move out of the house. Not so many teenagers do that.

Every single time conversations like this happen, it either ends up with Ethan slamming the door on his mum or his mother shedding tears because Ethan and his step father is arguing again. A nice way to say he's being beaten by his stepfather. 

Ethan is seventeen today, lives in this kinda jail his parents call home.

If you walk into that home... you won’t hear laughter.

You’ll hear rules nailed to the walls like warning signs.

Silence that watches you.

A couch that has memorized arguments.

A door that has learnt how to swallow screams and pretend it never hears anything. 

The walls are too close they breathe on Ethan at night.

His room isn’t a bedroom, it’s a holding cell with posters pretending to be windows.

His bed knows his weight too well, the way a grave knows a body is coming back.

At seventeen, Ethan already understands prisons.

Some have bars.

Others have family meetings and forced prayers, and a man who calls violence “discipline” because... well because he's trying to turn you from a boy to a man.

His mother says, “Just endure.”

She doesn’t know endurance is what broke him.

So Ethan learned escape.

Not the heroic kind, the quiet kind.

The kind that fits in a rolled piece of paper smoking at the end, in a glowing screen at 2 a.m., in a browser tab he closes faster than shame can knock.

Drugs taught him how to float when the house felt like it was sinking.

Porn taught him how to feel wanted without being touched.

Both promised relief.

Both charged interest.

Every hit is a temporary pardon. Every video whispers, you’re in control now.

But control is a liar with clean hands.

Ethan doesn’t sleep anymore, he passes out.

Dreams don’t visit him. Only flashbacks and the sound of footsteps that aren’t coming but he still flinches.

He looks at the mirror and sees a boy splitting into versions: the son his mother hopes for, the man his stepfather is beating him into, and the stranger who survives by disappearing.

That’s why he wanted to move out.

Not because he hates his mother, no; but because staying feels like slowly agreeing to die.

Today he is seventeen.

No cake.

Just candles made of regret and a wish he’s too afraid to say out loud:

If I stay, I will become this place.

And somewhere between the prison they call home and the addictions calling him by name, Ethan is still a boy, knocking softly on the inside of his own chest, hoping someone hears him before the door finally stops opening.

© amimoh_creatives