Papa and I drove around the country for 7 years. He told me it was a road trip. But the trip never seemed to end. Most of the time, we would stop at bar parking lots, he would leave me in the car and go inside. I would see him walking out of the bar with some lady and to a car that wasn't ours. He would come back for me the next morning, most of the time.

Sometimes I would wait days until he remembered me.

All the while, I thought Momma didn't want me anymore. Papa told me that Momma was tired of raising me. That she never wanted a second child. Papa said it was my fault we had to leave.

And I believed him.

A couple years in Papa and I started living in an apartment. One bedroom, one bathroom. He worked as a taxi driver so we had money, not a lot, but some. We would have had more money is he learned to save it but he never did.

I learned to cook pasta and how to pay taxes. Sometimes Papa wouldn't pay the power bill and I would be stuck in the dark for days on end. I slept on the couch, and most nights I'd cry myself to sleep. If Papa was home and heard me crying, he would yell at me to "Stop, or I'll give you something to cry about".

The world doesn't own me anything. That's what I learned in my time with Papa. The one time I saw Papa cry was the one time I saw him sober. He had just woken up from a mid-day nap and he sat in the couch next to me. He looked at me as if he felt bad. Sorrow in his tearful eyes.

"The world doesn't own me anything, but I am still mad at it for not giving me enough" he would tell me, over and over again. He cried, never moving his gaze off of me. It wasn't light tears either, he was fully sobbing, ugly crying. At the time, I thought he was crazy. But as I grow, I begin to realize that he was absolutely right.

After he stopped crying, he got up and went to the fridge. He cracked open a beer and began his usual cycle all over again.

I wish he was sober more often.