Growing up, there was a certain atmosphere just for me, becoming my prison, eventaully becoming my survival. This is an excerpt of my life...

"You'll never see outside again. It should have been you in that casket," she yells through the door. "You'll live to regret the day you were born, just like I do you son-of-a-bitch!"

Punished to my room again. I'm getting used to the four, green walls, the window that faces the brick building two inches away, the bed without blankets or sheets, the dresser which has been gouged by my praying fingers and has no mirror, and the locked door. I am a prisioner and my mother is the warden of my prison.

I worry that I will die here someday and no one will ever know. My feelings of escape and finding someone to love me ebb away, like the ocean at low tide. I know I am only seven, but it seems as if I have lived forever in this room. Every crack in the walls and ceiling have been known to me. I like to dream that they are my friends, whom I have watched grow over the years. I like to believe they sympathize with me, and grow bigger and wider, hoping over time they will be large enough to help me escape.

"This must be what death feels like," I think to myself. No one to hold you, nothing to do, and nothing to see, except the four sides of my casket. Sometimes though, I envy the dead people who lie in satin beds with pretty clothes, and they never feel hungry. I lie down on the bed and try to be dead. -