The rain was cold against my skin, as if I was covered in water that was clinging to me to form icicles. It seemed to get worse as I walked the two mile stretch of driveway up to my mother's house. You would think that after the last three winters of making this long hike, the cold weather would seem almost natural and not affect me as much. But the cold never got easier to deal with, neither did the hike. In fact, knowing where I was going seemed to make the walk only get harder and less desirable. So many times I have found myself wanting to turn back, but something always made me press on.

My mother thought that it was important to live as far away as possible from the rest of society. What was worse than that was the place she chose to live was in the middle of nowhere on the top of a hill. The nearest neighbor was about six miles away maybe a little less, which at the time scared me. Should there be an emergency, they might not be able to get here in time to help. Maybe my mother knew that and it was partially behind the reason as to why this was where she chose to live. We had tried to get her to move but after refusing practically a million times we gave up. She did not want to leave and there was no convincing her.

Ever since my father died three years ago in a car accident my mother has not been the same. Everything changed about her, her house included. She said that it hurt to live in the old house and I agreed, however leaving the old house was like leaving my father behind in a way. As much as she says it is better to live away from there I think that in the long run living in a place where his memories are strongest seems like it would have been the best option for both of us. Maybe had we stayed my mother would be different.

My mother and father were best friends all through high school. People said that they always knew that they were meant to be together, though they themselves did not realize it until halfway through college. Soul mates is what my grandmother called them often, and still does. They got married shortly after college and began a great life together. Both landed jobs with amazing companies and were on their way to having it all. I did not come until much later in the picture, ten years later to be exact. My mother said that I was her miracle. They had tried for years and then one day eight years after they started trying there I was. My father says it’s because if it had happened sooner it would not have been me, and I was what they really wanted. We were not the perfect family by far, but to me we were as perfect as we could get.

Two weeks before my thirteenth birthday my father was on one of his usual business trips. He worked for an advertising agency and he was one of their best. They sent him all over the world and sometimes we got to go with him. This was not one of those times because I was in school and my father did not feel it right to take me out of school unless it was an emergency of some sort. My mother however wishes everyday that she could have died along with him in that very instant that a drunk driver hit the side of his cab. She has never really said those words aloud but I knew them to be true. The day my father died, I think my mother died as well. Slipping into her own personal black hole, fearful of ever going towards the light again.

Currently, for this very reason I am living with my grandmother. Losing a son was hard enough for her but now she has to take care of me. I know that it is not easy for her at all, but she knows that if she does not do it, no one else will and she did not at the time want the state to take me away from my mother. My mother signed custody of me over easily. So easily that it made me feel that she did not want me. My grandmother said that it is not true, but she over the last three years has shown no signs of wanting me. I am grateful that I have my grandmother, but I think I would have been fine staying with my mom, even with the way things are.

The hardest part of living with my grandmother is the lies. She believes that it would be a social disaster for people to know the truth about my family. Not a single soul even knows my father is dead. Everyone is supposed to believe that my parents just travel a lot. It used to be hard on me, mainly because I did not understand how it would be so wrong for people to know the truth. Though talking about my father would lead to talking about my mother and that was a road I did not want to go down, so I lie. All I seem to do anymore is lie.

I slid my key into the lock of the gate that surrounded my mother’s house. It was a very old gate that made a shrieking sound when you pushed it open. I used to think of it as a warning, for the nightmare that was in store, as if I was about to enter some type of haunted house, full of things that would be too scary for me to see. Never would that gate understand how right it was. I always feared what was behind the front door of my mother’s house. Inside laid the soul of a broken woman and a corpse that resembled her living within its halls. I shut the gate behind me and felt the darkness close in around me. It was the darkness of my mother’s own personal hell that was taking me over. I screamed on the inside at myself because I knew that I could escape but I continued forward in the darkness.

I stood on my mother’s doorstep for what seemed like an hour, though it was only a few short minutes. I listened closely to the sound of the television but could not make out any words. I had to prepare myself and get ready for what was to come. Never was a weekend at my mother’s the same and you never knew what to expect. Preparing myself was just a long process of talking myself out of turning around and running away. I have had many dreams of running from this place, running until my legs gave out and I had to push myself to keep going. It was dreams like that, that almost made running seem like something I needed to do.

If things were like the most normal of days my mother would be sitting in her chair watching game shows or some sappy made for television movie. This in my opinion never helped, because those shows were always depressing. The last thing she needed was another depressing thing pushing into her mind. I stopped caring what she watched a while back though when I realized she never really watched the shows. One time in an attempt to get through to her, I turned off the television and stood in front of it. She looked right through me to the television, eyes fixed as if the show was still going on behind me. Saving her in the moment was pointless.

I stopped trying after that, at least I stopped trying as hard as I had before. I now just used the time at my mother's to get away from the world and think. My grandmother wanted to be a part of every little thing that I did and I never had the time to just sit by myself and be alone, so that is what I did here. I tended to spend most of my weekends here watching television or locked up in my room on the Internet, which fortunately my mother did have. Why she had it I was not sure, she never got on her computer, at least not that I had seen.

I pushed my way through the heavy door that separated my mother from the world. It was always cold in her house, as if turning the heater on was going to harm her. I spent most of my weekend with my jacket on or wrapped up in a blanket. This cold I had gotten used to for it was not as harsh as it was outside but it was still annoying. I kind of liked it however, mainly because it was something that I could expect from my mother’s house. In fact, it was the only thing that I could count on. I don’t even think my mother knows where the heater is. Not that she would use it. Maybe she is trying to freeze herself to death, or maybe she just stopped caring about things all together.

I headed towards the living room to find that it was empty. The television sounded like it was on full blast and the light from it flickered across the walls of this black hole. Generally my mother was sitting in the oversized leather chair that sat directly in front of the television but she was nowhere to be seen. In my opinion this was never a good thing. When she was not in front of the television she was having one of her episodes. Generally they were memories of when I was a child. She spoke to me as if I were her five year old little girl. This did not bother me. It was when she thought I was someone else that was hard. I tried to play along the best I could but it was getting harder and harder to pretend to be someone I am not.

“Judy,” my mother let out with excitement as she excited the kitchen. Her hair was done up behind her head, a few long curls escaping here and there, cupping her face. She wore a light lipstick which seemed to put a little bit of color back into her face. There is no doubt that she still looked pale, as if her skin had not seen the sun in the last three years, which to be truthful it hadn’t. Her eyes however did not match the rest of her. They were still empty. They seemed to be watching a movie going on around them, but not participating at all. “I have been waiting for you to get home all day.”

She came up to me and wrapped her arms around me. “Judy you are never going to believe what happened today.” Judy was my mother’s twin sister. Before about six years ago when my aunt got married and moved out of the country, her and my mother were the best of friends. I looked a lot like they did as teenagers, which my grandmother says makes it easier for my mother to see me as being Judy. I wish that I could play the role of Judy for my mother, be that best friend that she desperately needs right now but I could not do it. When it was me pretending to be me it was one thing, at least my mother was seeing me. When my mother sees Judy, it means she does not see me and I no longer exist. Not existing was the hardest feeling to deal with out of them all.

My mother reached out to me again, though she was really reaching for Judy. “Judy,”she said with concern in her voice as I pulled away from her. “Is something the matter?”she asked. I searched her eyes. Though she showed a look of worry on her face her eyes were still flat and empty. I pushed back tears as our gazes locked. I needed her to see me, her daughter. See the person who had been there for her the entire time when no one else cared enough to take the time. I desperately needed her to hold on to me and tell me that things would be fine. Her eyes stayed empty and I got nothing I wished for, only a look of concern for my aunt.

I grabbed my mother’s arm, wanting to yank her back into reality. I wanted to scream at her to snap out of it, that this was no longer funny, but I stayed quiet. As quickly as I had grabbed her arm, I let it go. She would not understand anything I said to her and it would just be a waste of breath. My mother was no longer my mother and I knew this, yet I still felt the urge to try and make some type of connection. I was her daughter. I felt that if anyone could do it, it would be me. I was part of who my mother was, yet maybe I didn’t really want to find her. Maybe I knew my mom died when my father did and if I found her it would never be the mother I had before.

I turned away from my mother and walked to my room at the end of the hall. She called out for Judy behind me and I fought back a tear. I gently shut the door behind me and sat down at my computer desk. I pushed my headphones in my ears, to block out the sound of my mother calling for her sister and the television in the living room, blasting out letters to a game show. Booting up my computer I turned on something loud to make it all go away. Though it never all went away, it continued on in the loud depressing lyrics that burst against my eardrums.

I had been visiting this chat room a lot lately called “Lonely.” It seemed to fit how I was feeling lately. It was part of a chat community that I had joined a while back. I sit in the room and watch people talk about their lives. I have never got the courage to say anything myself, for fear that I would come off sounding like an idiot to all these people who seemed to be going through a lot. I felt my situation was worse than most, but you never really know, so I never said anything. Tonight I was going to say something though. I needed to talk to someone, anyone who was willing to listen to me. I slowly typed out my greeting and hit enter, hoping that I was not doing something that I would regret in the future.

“Hello, My name is Madeline, and I am an orphan.” That is what the world got to see. That was now what I was. I was an orphan.