Chapter 2 HELL IS A PLACE ON EARTH

• CHAPTER 2
• HELL IS A PLACE ON EARTH
• G W E N D O L Y N
• Hell.
• I have always wondered what it looks like.
• I have always had my own images of how hell would look like and I wonder if it is the same with the hell that I know.
• Hell.
• Have you ever asked yourself what it could actually look like?
• Or, if it ever existed like how it’s described on books, movies, online and such?
• I did.
• Always.
• I never liked the thought of being burned, enslaved and tortured because of the sins that I have had committed in my previous life. I also wonder how my past self lived her own life, if ever she was in constant hate, anger and fear. They said the bad things that happens to you in your present life are things that deserved to happen to you. It’s like your debt.
• The life I am living now is my debt to my past self.
• God, was I that awful of a person?
• But no matter how many times I think about it, I don’t think I deserve things that are happening in my life right now. I don’t think I deserve to have this kind of inescapable loop-hole hell that I am going through.
• Hell.
• I highly think there is that kind of place here on earth. It exists, for sure. It exists because of the people that gives you that kind of hell and torture because it is something that they can do best. Hell, can be avoidable they say.
• I wish it was that easy.
• For me, I struggle every single waking day of my life finding heaven but it seems too unreachable for me. How would I be able to avoid this kind of torture that I am experiencing when it’s already consuming too much of me ever since I was a young girl?
• Hell.
• I always imagined it as hot, filled with blazing fire and sulfur that burns your soul to ashes and lots of smoke that goes forever and ever. Hell is a place for bad people, I always thought of that when I was young. A place for evil people who are subjected for punitive suffering eternally.
• Growing up, I asked myself if I was that evil to deserve this kind of evilness and torture. I kept thinking that I was not bad or that I could be and that evil is the people around me.
• Growing up I witnessed hell myself.
• Hell is home and Satan is my mother.
• She is evidently selfish, wicked and cruel.
• I jolt up from my bed in horror. I was woken up in the middle of the night when I heard a familiar scream echo throughout the entire place. Our apartment was really small and empty. Everyday I wish it was bigger so I can have much places to hide whenever I want to. The only place that I can call my own safe haven was my small bedroom which only had a single bed, a light on the ceiling and my tiny dresser which barely had much clothes because my mom mostly had sold them just to have money for her addiction.  
• We didn’t even have much furniture left in our house because she had sold out almost every single thing in our apartment. We don’t even have a decent dining table, fridge or utensils needed for cooking because she sold all of them. I live daily by take-outs and it kind of sucks that I live in this kind of crappy place and crappy life.
• I sprinted out from my bed and tried to carefully put my ear next to my bedroom door where I can hear more screaming. It was my mom shouting and I can vaguely hear another man’s voice shouting back too. I’m sure it’s Carter, my mom’s drug-addicted boyfriend who is about three years older than me. Obviously, he’s only staying with my mom because he can steal money from her and I hate how she’s so blind about the fact that he’s just milking money from her.
• To think, the money he is getting from her is the same money that she steals from me.
• My mom had a few boyfriends after my father passed away and her choices of guys since then drastically went from worse to really awfully the worst. I hated Carter the most because he has been hitting on me ever since mom introduced us. What was worst is that whenever he is around, he tries to sexually touch me when my mom is asleep or when she is too high to bother about anything around her including me. Whenever I am home and he is around, I make sure I lock my bedroom door.
• I tried to go back to sleep and covered myself with my blanket even though it wasn’t really helping me from avoiding the screaming.
• I have a couple of part-time jobs and it’s kind of tiring to just work your ass off, getting paid and getting robbed by your own mother. My mom’s addiction happened when my father died, I thought it wasn’t going to last long because my mom has never been the type to get addicted into things easily but I was wrong. Mom’s addiction has gotten worst yearly and the lies just keeps on piling one over the other that it’s so hard to believe anything she tells me.
• Working in a flower shop gives me the opportunity to divert my attention from my problems because I get to be busy arranging flowers for customers. In the morning, I work as a florist from seven in the morning till three in the afternoon and help Mrs. Lambert in her floral shop. At night, I work as a part-time delivery girl in a small pizza place and it ends around ten in the evening. The pay isn’t really much for both jobs, especially if mom steals from my savings, but since I haven’t attained any bachelor’s degree, I wouldn’t want to complain much.
• After a long day, I decided to head home but as soon as I reached the house, I see my mother frantically crying in the living room with dark circles and widened eyes. Her lips trembling and she looked awfully frightened as she was hiding behind the door of her bedroom.
• “Mom, are you okay?” I asked her.
• “Close the door! Hurry!” She instructed.
• My brows creasing as I begin to close the front door behind me, “What’s the matter?”
• She cries as she keeps biting the tip of her fingernails, “They’re coming! You have to hide me! You have to hide me!” Her choice trembling in fear and she looked really scared.