Rain on car windows, memoir.

So the boiler bloke is here. It is vaguely awkward. I mean, a situation where you walk in and for some reason open the tea cup cupboard is always a winner. My blank gaze did him no confidence after this, and I recommended I show him where the boiler actually was.
I suppose it's in the job description some where - Walk in, open cupboard, find boiler. He does seem pretty simple. Conversation died at 'Well here's the boiler, move any thing if need be, I'll be downstairs'. In fact it did.
Up and down the stairs he goes, not a word, just expressionless glances of a man doing what a man does to survive.
I wish and pray (in my own athiestish way) that I should never have the misfortune to look so very impassionate in my life. Dear lord, i just wrote that as impassionation. My fingers are aching to write and I have been denying this freeing pleasure of rambling, and so they taunt me with words that I am rather sure do not exsist. Although that one seems as though it may.

I had a night of restless tire, just last. It was unsettling but calm and quiet. I felt not like eating, not like drinking, vaguely sickly and bodily tired. Each muscle felt as those bruised do. My eyes heavy and dry, my lips parted and dumb. And yet, sleep would not come.
Instead, as I threw down the games controller and laid my head upon familiar pillow, I recieved slow flash backs and peculiar memory. Fearful days. The music I hid within. The bands on my wrists of which i fiddled with. The white sun shining in, acting as a comfort blanket to all else. And myself, cold with fear on otherwise delightful spring afternoons.
One evening, after school, the memory portrays. Mother, and my then-stepdad wordlessly mentioned that we were going to a resturant, not far, but a drive none the less. I had seated myself in the back, both earphones in, coated in teenage angst, listening to this;
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VhiwRhPS1O0

The motorway was dusty and dry, the plants skimming its edges were dull and lack-lustre for spring, the washed out sun giving them a limp appearance as the cars swept them lazily in succession. Mother and 'him' chatted rather idly, but dispassionate, all ordinaire. Not like a couple in love, not at all. A couple left, that's what they portrayed.
A resturant meal with your now-family should be something of or like pleasant. Sweet, quiet, a treat. They tried speaking to me, I am aware, although there were taunts there were also comments of schooling and friendships. Light and disintersted. As they sat opposite me, my form lingering to the left of the table as if ready to make an exit, I felt as one might when being at a job interview. I kept my head down, tucked my hands in and out of my red, cotton jacket, and fiddled with the spikes adorning my arms.

The resturant was family oriented, warm and welcoming. Picture and feel this.
The oranges and reds of a plush carpet, very much like your typical Harvester. The ivory and creams of simple walls, parted by occasional beams and wooden detailing, all polished to appear older than the fibre glass they likely are. Hints of gold in the detailing, photos of farmland and bowls of fruit, soft in stroke and copied in print. A fireplace out of sight to me, not burning, but maintaining the character of the room.
The white light of an afternoon sun slipped in through the low windows, adorned in heavy red and golden curtains, it lay upon the shimmering cutlery and circular polished stained tables lazily. It gave each glass it's own source of light, aching my eyes and giving the overall effect of clean. Of sanitary. Of safety.
Not like the drear and brown of the glass mugs we had used in the house we had not long escaped from.
Only two years before this had public places given me sanctum. I felt safe in them, with other people around, other people who probably had, in my eyes, warm homes, sweet pets, and a light that stayed on all night. But not I, for home was fear in simplicity.

This day of which I speak, i gave up. But torn was my young self, and very young I was. I had not broken into a sweat, but I felt that similar trickle, cool and threatening, slip down my spine. That fear that caught in my throat when an image ran across my mind, and for time and time i could not shake it's irrational shaking of my wellbeing.
Too afraid to see tomorrow, and yet too afraid also to die. Each, for me, seemed to bring the same unknown, the same loathing and cul-de-sac path to follow. I felt it cruel that I should have only the two as a choice. And running from either was not an option, for run, we already had. This was my destiny.
Oh how warm a light could have seemed, shining back from where I had ran from.
And yet i knew that even there, the lights were out at night.
I looked to the little public that had gathered in this resturant the same night as us. I remember none of them, as few as there were, i remember no faces, no gender, no races. Only jealousy.
Might I have a mind as blank as yours? I assumed as I looked to them, eyes wide with hopelessness. You with clean slate, may I not live simply and happily as you!
From the age of 10, I often wished myself amnesia. We would go on many a long car journey at that age, back and forth, hiding, running, through the night and early dawn. I would either lie beneath a sheet in the back of the rickety van amongst 'his' tools, or slumber in the back of a car well tracked. The rain would pound at the car, or the clear sky was breath heavily upon the windows. And I would wish, with all my might and adolescent wonder, I would pray to an unknown force that tomorrow, I may wake without memory.
I made no hold backs, no 'let me just remember this or that', just simple and utter 'I don't want it any more'.
Of course, this irrationality was pathetic, and young of I, and had I forgotten the memories I cherish I would not forgive myself inwardly, of course, however, I may have had my wish granted, and never have known of such a thing ever exsisting, only the memory of asking for it to happen in the first place.

A journey late into the night, 2 or 3 in the morning, to the east and then back again, or vice versa. I awoke in the back seat, and much like a childhood memory of a nightmare once had, I burst into tears. I cried and simply cried, and my mother in the front seat responded just as she had in the Nightmare memory;
Harsh words and misunderstanding. I made up an excuse, just as I had done as a 4 year old, and told her not of the things I had seen.

And I never did.