Enough

Clinging to his mother's purse, Owen sat down, defeated. His feet were sore from running, he was out of breath, and Chicago was an hour's drive away. That wouldn't have seemed so far, if he'd had a ride. He could feel a rock digging into his ass cheek, and he began to cry behind his designer glasses. Looking down, he noticed that the black nail polish on his left thumb was chipped. Perfect.
He had to admit, it was already more glamorous than his previous life. At least he could wear a dress now. Back at the forlorn, isolated house, with his asshole father, he couldn't even wear heels or a cute hat. One time his father caught him with one of his mother's old purses, and had beat Owen until he couldn't even stand. His father then spent four goddamn hours scrubbing Owen's fingerprints off of the purse, sobbing and apologizing to no one in particular. Owen was 16 at the time, and thought he was tough enough to finally face his old man.
"She's dead," he said coldly from the door of the bathroom, leaning on the door-frame with one hand on his hip. "She doesn't care if I use her purse, she's DEAD. She has been for years and it's time you fucking realized it."

That was the night he ended up at the hospital. Three broken ribs, a punctured lung, and bruises from head to toe.
The hospital psychologist asked him privately if his father was telling the truth about how Owen fell down the stairs. It was his choice. He could get out, change his life. But he just confirmed his father's story and went home.

The bathroom in that ever-alone house was dark, the light casting a dirty yellow glow over the sad tiles, raw from years of being scrubbed too hard. Maybe that was why Owen's father cleaned it so much; the light made it seem like it was never really clean. This was where Owen usually found him, lying drunk on the floor, a dark stain on the perfect tile, a bleach-saturated sponge clasped desperately in his hand. He almost pitied his father. This was where he usually beat Owen, for criticizing his cleaning or drinking, or for getting a fingerprint on the mirror.
Only semi-conscious, his father began to whisper. "Unclean," he choked out, "You're unclean."

Owen had many small rebellions throughout the years. One such day, at 18, half a year before he left, he had gone further than he ever imaged. After his father told him he couldn't leave the house again for a week, Owen went out and stomped through a muddy field, ran into the house with his now destroyed sneakers, and stomped around the small bathroom triumphantly.
He'd woken up in the shower aching, hot water pouring down from the shower head onto his broken body, to see his father scrubbing the last of Owen's blood off the floor, crying in his usual drunken state, repeating the word 'sorry' like a mantra. Owen didn't even remember his father coming into the room, didn't remember the first blow.

This was how his life worked. An unreliable series of vignettes, memories only as he recalled them, no strings to connect the images and impressions shaped in his mind. The first of these images was like an old photograph with stains and rips and bad lighting: a single image of his mother looking down at him.
His father always said she was no better than him, a filthy blue collar worker, stripping on the side to fund a drug addiction. Owen never really believed him, though. In his mind, she was an angel, the most beautiful woman to have ever walked the earth (although in pictures he later saw, he realized he was just romanticizing; she was quite average looking. Another false memory). As a child, he always dreamed she would swoop down from heaven and carry him away. That was back when he still believed in heaven, in God, in angels, in his mother. But he gave up on all of that years ago.

Having planned to leave for months, Owen woke up that morning with a clear conviction. Today would be the day; it was finally time to leave. While his father was drinking in front of the television, Owen stole his family's only picture of his mother. It was a simple picture, a smiling woman waving to a camera with red mittens and hot breath clouding her face. She was wearing skates, standing on the middle of a frozen pond, her cheeks pink and her hair messy from the cold wind. She looked so alive, so young. She couldn't have been more than twenty five. Immortalized in a simple wooden frame, she was like an idol, silently worshipped by two lonely men in a forgotten trailer an hour outside of town. Tucking the photograph into one of her old purses, and slipping on her favourite old pair of shoes, Owen felt closer to his mother than he had been in years.

After his father passed out drunk, Owen prepared to take off. He wrote a short note -- "Goodbye" -- and packed two outfits and a toothbrush into a backpack. Purse in hand, backpack slung over his shoulders, he made to leave. Something tugged at him though, something he couldn't explain. He quietly turned around and walked over to his father. Stroking his thinning grey hair, Owen gave him a sympathetic kiss on the forehead.
He took a deep breath, blinked away a few tears, and whispered, "I love you. I really do." He then ran out of the house, ran until his shoes hurt his feet and he couldn't see the trailer in the distance, and then sat down on the dirt. He cried until he fell asleep.

He couldn't tell how long he'd been there, only that the sun was down when he woke. He wasn't sure what had shaken him out of his sleep, until he saw a pick-up truck in the distance, driving down the usually abandoned dirt road. Owen immediately stood up and stuck out his thumb like he'd seen in movies. As the truck approached, he felt a nervous twinge in the pit of his stomach. He'd never done anything like this before, never really lived outside of his father.
The truck slowed, and a handsome man of about thirty rolled down the window.
"You looking for a ride?" he asked politely, a Southern twinge lacing his smooth voice. Owen just nodded, and walked around to the other side.
"Where are you headed? And why in God's name are you dressed like a woman?"
"Chicago. And because I like to dress this way." Owen looked up. "Do you have a problem with that?"
"No, sorry. Didn't mean to offend. I'm just not exactly used to the look. Name's Alex."
"Owen."

The rest of the ride was more or less silent. Owen let his arm hang lazily out the window, catching the air between his fingers, while his driver tapped his fingers on the steering wheel, slowly chewing some day-old gum. Owen couldn't help but feel that the scene was classic, like something from the movies he'd so earnestly tried to believe could be real.
Optimism pays off, he thought with the slightest grin.

He couldn't help but feel nervous, though. The further they drove, the closer to his dreams he got, the more he felt that he was just making himself lost. He didn't know how to exist outside of a victim's life. He had always defined himself as a victim, and his father as his oppressor. This was their relationship to one another, and to society. Now, kicking up dust behind the tires, a beat-up blue truck was carrying him forward, away from that life, towards the life that always seemed just out of reach. He was scared that life wouldn't be what he was hoping for, and terrified that it would be. He was hanging in the balance, one foot in and one foot out, lost somewhere in the infinite no-man's land that hung between reality and fantasy. He was circling among the stars, with nothing to push off of, no idea of how to get direction. His worst fear of all was that once he arrived, he wouldn't come crashing down to earth, but would remain in the uncertainty forever, never really living life in the moment. Always looking behind him, always looking ahead.

With a lurch (the truck stalled), he woke up. He'd fallen asleep again, his head sore where it was resting against the car door. Looking up through the darkness, Chicago was clearly visible. It was bright and awake, though the voice on the radio was telling him it was a chilly midnight. Sure, it was no NYC, but it was alive, and that was enough. He was finally on his own. They had arrived.
As he thanked his driver and stepped out onto a downtown sidewalk, he knew that everything would be okay. He walked down the sidewalk alone, swinging his hips just so, tossing his hair and feeling fabulous. He no longer felt unpure, no longer the tarnished, abhorred creature he had been before. He was just another face, just another wildly glamorous face in a city that didn't give a damn. And somehow, that was freeing.

He settled down in a dark, inconspicuous alley, and zipped open the backpack. Pulling out a warm but still deliciously adorable sweater, he sighed contentedly. He wrapped himself in the sweater, tucked his purse and his bag under his head, and fell asleep beside a trash can.
He didn’t know where he’d go in the morning. He didn’t know where he’d live, work, eat. But he knew he was free, sleeping on the cement. It was as much as he'd ever dared to dream. And it was enough.