Chapter Text
My family was deeply affected by the Potato Famine, created by the English. I didn’t experience it because I was born about twenty years later in 1874. Though I didn’t experience it, it still made my blood boil and my hands ache for revenge, to seek retribution. I had an aunt that I never got to meet because of the famine.
My mother had gotten tuberculosis in the summer of 1896, I tried to help my mother as much as possible. It was an awful thing to have to watch my mother die slowly , to watch the slow decline of the woman that raised you. I had always liked my mother more than my father. She was sweet and caring, he was cold and distant. I think I've had about six full conversations with the man. But I looked just like my father, dark brown hair and freckles covering my face, with slate blue eyes. Maybe that’s why he didn't like me very much, he saw himself in me, or maybe i'm just making excuses for him.
As my mothers condition got worse she couldn't leave the house. Walking made her overwhelmingly tired, so she spent most days in bed. Then one day I went to check in on her and read her those books she liked, she was dead. It was horrid, seeing her like that, granted it wasn't gory or anything but it made my insides twist and my throat form a lump deep down as tears bubbled under my eyes. The sweetest most caring and loving woman was gone, unceremoniously gone.
After that it was just my father and me. I had promised myself to stay strong for my father, I knew it was gonna be hard. My father and I had never had the best relationship but I told myself it would get better if I just put the effort in; it didn’t. My father started to distance himself from me. He would spend days out at a time drinking away his sorrows while I sat in our small wooden house with two bedrooms, waiting for my father to stumble into the kitchen and almost falling to his face as he made his way into his room and passed out. But a part of me didn’t blame my father for wanting to leave this house that was haunted by the people living in it. It stayed like this for a while, until one day I came home to find my father dead on the floor. A puddle of vomit surrounds his head like some kind of awful halo like the ones I had seen surrounding the saints that were painted on the church walls, and I thought I was gonna be sick. I had never really been close with my father, and that hurt but seeing him like this hurts even worse. That night is when I decided to leave my life of pain in Ireland. I had heard about a cargo boat that was heading to America. That’s where I’m going.