Chapter 1- A moment of innocence

From as far back as I can remember, life has been somewhat hard for me to handle. I was 6 years old, my father was a cop. He would come home and find something, some excuse to take his anger out on me. I don't even remember the reason but I guess it's irrelevant. Work was really stressful for him, which turned where I lived into an unsafe place. Control was a drug for my father. To this day I wish he would have just smoked weed, but weed was looked down on as a toxic substance that turned your brains to mush. I'm still perplexed at the fact he is so entrusting of the law. To me, I feel like the government took what was once my father away from me. It's his own damn fault though, he refused to learn anything new, wrote everything off because he thought he wasn't good at anything else.

At the time we lived in a modest side hall colonial with a swamp and a weeping willow in the backyard. Other than the abuse, I lived a pretty normal childhood. I had friends on that block, ate my first honeysuckle at a friend's house around the corner. Learned how to ride a bike on that block. Life was still full of hope.

Three years go by, my father, fed up with the neighbors classic car rotting in the driveway (who cares) and the flooding in the backyard, decides to put the house up for sale and go buy a new center hall colonial on the other side of town. It was more space then our family needed and it sat mostly empty for first year and a half that we lived in it. The development was brand new and most of the houses weren't done being built. One by one our neighbors started to move in, what ended up being my best friend at the time moved in across the street. Things got progressively worse...