Josie Dalton - Late Night Clutterthoughts.

1980's Wyoming, USA

TW: Parental Problem, Toxic Environment, Abuse.

I get it, purpose is this big, shiny thing we're all supposed to have, something that justifies everything we've done, every mistake, every choice. But for real? I don't know what that means anymore. Yeah, I have goals, ambitions, and maybe even a single clutterfuck of a dream left. But those are just steps in the ladder I never asked to climb, aren't they? Not some grand answer to why I'm here.

It's July 19th, 1987, dead at night in Bleakstone. It is a place so fucking small you'd miss it on a piss-covered map, just a cluster of run-down houses, a few shops with their signs flickering out, a gas station that always seems half-alive. The air is always thick with the smell of asphalt cooling from the day's heat, and the only sounds are the crickets out in the fields, a few moths batting against a flickering streetlight, and the hum of an old car passing now and then, each on its way to some warm home. Families, couples, and people who belong somewhere, are headed to places where someone cares if they come back.

But not for me, at least. Just the road and me lie stretching ahead, long and empty. Even my own footsteps echo a little too loudly, the quiet way it makes me feel like the only living soul left on earth.

I had little patience ever for the two old farts back home. Every day, it is just the same damn routine of yelling for nothing, slamming the doors, voices bouncing off the walls like they're the only two people on earth. They are addicted with the drama, as if they would not know what to do with themselves if they were actually to get along. They don't even notice me half of the time unless it is to tell me how I am screwing up my life. Dropped out of school? "Waste of potential." Hang around with "the wrong crowd"? "Gonna end up like them." Like I give a damn what they think.

I used to stay in my room, headphones blasting anything loud enough to drown out the screaming, trying to pretend I wasn't part of it. But you can only take so much of that before it starts to eat at you, you know? So I find my escape out here, on my board. I can leave them and that house and every toxic thing they ever s