I don't really know where to begin- each of our stories are so fantastic that others find them hard to believe. Believe that they happened? Believe that we survived fully intact? Or C, believe that we aren't still considered criminals for what we did? The answer, D-All the above.
Yes, it was a trick question- you didn't have all the answers, and neither did we.
My story begins in a Dollar General parking lot somewhere in the fields of Kentucky. I couldn't have been more confused about being left and abandoned there by my family. Two parents, one brother and a blue-tick greyhound. Gone. Completely out of my world within a matter of 90 seconds.
I had spent the first ten years of my life with them. And to answer the question you probably are all wondering- no they didn't adopt me. No, I wasn't in the foster systems. These a-holes were my birth people and now they are my gone people. In those ten years they had always given me reason to believe I could trust them. I mean, I shared my hopes and dreams with them, showed off all my cool kid talents, and even told them my deepest fears. Abandonment being at the top of my list. Why did I have to go and tell them that?!
Since they left, I have now learned that my trust can't be just given out willy-nilly to people, even if they did push me out of their body. Trust had to be earned from then on out. And I found trust in a group of others that were just like me - humans fighting for survival.
There were only two other kids, one older and one younger than me, out of the entire group of twenty-some. I found them in what I believed to be at one time the most remarkable place. I found them in the garbage dumpsters outside of Ralley's Diner. They were literal garbage people. They were my people. They shared their food scraps with me that night and invited me to join their hunger trail again in the morning.
I did.
I haven't regretted it yet; even though I have had to do some horrible things to stay with the group. To prove that they can trust me. I get that though- because I'm still testing them every day. -