Now is the part where I tell, show? Tell and show. Show and tell! That's why they call it that in school! Because it's okay to do both! Fuck you, writing guides! This is my fucking story, and I'll tell it how I want to tell it. This is where I tell you why I live by myself, in a shitty-ass illegal basement suite, and why I don't like talking about my father. Or my mother. Or anything.

Let's get one thing out of the way right off the hop. I don't feel sorry for myself. I have food. I have a roof over my head. Am I sure the roof isn't crawling with mold and God knows what else? Not remotely. But I've woken up every day, having somehow made it through another spin without going tits up.

Well, sometimes I sleep tits up. Or to the side. Never down. That hurts.

Dying. I haven't died yet. And that's more than you can say for all the dead people.

Let me paint you a picture: I got home after my pit stop at Del's shop and dug a pizza popper out of the freezer. Do I like pizza poppers? Sure. They're edible. Would I rather eat something that counted as food? Hell yes. But that shit was always ten times more expensive than the shit that was bad for you. More chemicals, more added flavours, and more shit you can't pronounce were those that people could afford. People like me, at least.

I grabbed my pillow from my foamie on the floor and sidled up nice and close to my tiny TV. Tyrant Kings roared to life, and we were away.

I stole my console. I couldn't afford one. I stole it right off the shelf at a big box store, and I honestly didn't feel bad not looking back. I didn't even set off the alarm.

Here's the thing. This is where I tell you some stuff, and by the end, you're going to be all 'awwww, I'm glad she told us that. She's so strong and amazing, and we should all strive to be more like her.' Or something like that.

Mum died when I was little. Like, kindergarten little. I remember her smile, hugs, and always smelling like coconut because of her hand lotion. Her voice faded so long ago that I can't even remember what I thought it sounded like. She was warm and lovely but always seemed worried about something, like she had something on her mind, or her focus was always in at least two places at once.

I never knew Mum's people, like my grandparents, any aunts and uncles, cousins – nothing. They didn't exist, or they all died before I was born, but the only person I could talk to about Mum took off when I was eighteen.

Dad – not exactly Danny Tanner in his efforts, but I never went hungry or cold growing up – but he laid a shocker on me the day after my 18th birthday. I remembered that day like it was happening right now. It felt like I was living two days at once, every day.

"I'm leaving," he said.

I spluttered something like 'what...why...incoherent mouth noise...'

He didn't even look back. "I only stuck around because of your mother. I can't even look at you anymore. You're 18 now, and I can't do it anymore."

No apology. No real explanation. An envelope with five hundred bucks inside, and I hadn't seen him since. I won't lie; I was pretty broken. I crashed on Del's parents' couch for a few weeks, but got my own place. If you can even call it that.

This was my reality. My rotten little hole in the ground, complete with weird shit growing in the ceiling, paper-thin walls so I could hear the couple next door doing God-knows-what to each other, and a landlord that only really understood the 'collect rent at the beginning of the month' end of the bargain. If I could die and still pay the man, he'd be over the moon.

Did I think about my dad? Yeah, obviously. I remembered Christmases, shoulder rides after school, and ordering pizza more times than was healthy, but those memories were fading more quickly than I wanted. There was something else boiling up in their place. I didn't want to think about that something else. If I let it win, let it take over and fill in all the gaps with what I knew it wanted to do, I would lose both of them. Mum wasn't coming back. Some sad, shriveled part of me still clung to the pathetic belief that Dad was going to knock on my door and make everything good again.

Maybe there was a reason I played hideously violent games like Tyrant Kings. Anything to take my mind off the madness therein, yeah?

This was my life. Day in, day out. Just existing. If I disappeared tomorrow, the only person that would even notice I was gone had so much going on in his life that he'd probably miss my funeral. Maybe I wouldn't even have a funeral. Did they do that? Was it possible to die and be an 'X' on the 'Deceased' column?

Don't get me wrong. I didn't dread getting out of bed in the morning. I just sometimes wondered what the point was. I used that energy to mow through the first wave of assholes in Tyrant Kings. That fuelled the second, the third, and after a while, I got into a groove and lost track of time. The screen blurred, I wasn't even thinking about the moves I was making, and I didn't even know when I fell asleep.

I sure as hell remember when I woke up.