Day Thirty-nine - Wild is the wind

Before we move on to the final few years of my time spent going to school, let's see where I was and how things were on other levels. So, about 1986, I moved from a tiny town to a tinier village where my father had his offices. I mean, we actually didn't live there, we lived some 8 kms away in a tiny, tiny, tiny hamlet - and I positively hated living there. It wasn't just that I didn't really make any friends - my brother made a bunch, but then he's alwasy been much more outgoing than I ever was. It was also that gnawing feeling that everyone there resented us because we were the outsiders who'd come from 'the big city'. My time spent there was one marked by a profound loneliness, and it's a curious thing : as an adult I would have loved to have lived there, and make the most od so much natural beauty that was all around me, and for which I cared little as a kid. Just behind where we lived there were these woods, and sometimes I'd venture into them, though not very far. I'd rather spend my days inside the house, and I'd either be in the living room watching movies or whatever was on the TV, or I'd be in my room playing with my action figures or reading comics or science fiction books. Not as often as I'd wish, though, sometimes I'd find some loose change and go to one of the local caffes who'd have maybe a couple of arcade machines. My absolute favourite at that time was Sega's seminal masterpiece 'Golden Axe' - and I was so absolutely horrendous at it. Many a quarter was pumped into that machine, in a lot of different places, and I never ever got good at it. Only when - much later - I played it via emulation and had unlimited continues did I manage to finish the game. 

Meanwhile, my family life wasn't going that well. You see, me and my father never really got along that great and his violence - both physical and verbal - sure didn't help any. From a very young age, I knew I felt no emotional attachment to him. There was a clear division between me and my brother - he was much more devoted to our father, and I to our to mother. My sister, being the youngest, was obviously the apple of everyone's eyes, but even so she wouldn't be enough to keep our parents together. Fair's fair : my mother had it up to here with him anyway, and I can only imagine how long she'd been pondering that separation. Things were never peaceful between them, and my mother could be just as abusive towards us as my father was, and she also didn't treat him well sometimes. Things always seemed to be just simmering close enough to reach a boiling point at any given time, and the last summer our family ever spent together was fraught with such chaos that we, as a unit, all but ceased to exist.