A Girl Like Me

I sat around Saturday night from 7 pm till midnight pondering what idea I should use to start working on my next novel. I couldn't settle on anything. But I didn't want to go to bed without writing anything at all so I did a writing exercise instead. Using free assocaition I wrote a page off the top of my head.

A Girl like Me

Don’t think I don’t know the truth. I always knew the truth. But I needed him . So I needed the lie.
In the home I grew up in things were never stable. But you could get by if you knew how to play the game. I majored in playing the game but didn’t get out with a college diploma in Thriving Among the Madness or even Surviving Despite it all. But I got out with my life. That was more than some people in that house could say.
I landed in the system with a thud a few days before Christmas after my mother flung the Christmas tree, the same one she had just set on fire, at her boyfriend and took out his eye. Ralph, a stray who followed her home from last call three months earlier and never left, walked around with a permanent dopey grin on his face. But his who gives a rats ass attitude didn’t extend to losing his sight or having his greased up hair ignite.
The cops came and asked if Mom often had emotional outbursts. I picked a hell of a time to stop keeping my mothers secrets because immediately after I said "Every damn day,." she flung the baby Jesus at my head.She spent a few hours handcuffed to a bench downtown until Aunt Rosey, her five ragamuffins in thrift store pajamas trailing behind, bailed her out. Her horrible ordeal was over before the sun came up but mine would last until I aged out of the system.
THE END