Chapter 3 - The Price of Freedom
The first few weeks were the hardest.
I rented a small,
dingy room in a part of town that smelled of exhaust and despair.
I had the money from the debts she had cleared,
but I refused to touch the remaining cash she had tucked into the shoebox.
It felt like blood money,
and I wasn't ready to spend it on myself.
I found work at a local construction site,
doing the heavy lifting that no one else wanted to do.
Each day,
I pushed my body to the limit,
hoping the physical exhaustion would drown out the mental loop of her voice.
Every time I received a paycheck,
I looked at it and remembered her words in the journal.
"A man who works with his hands,
finds peace in the struggle."
I started to understand what she meant.
The independence I had craved for years was finally mine,
but it was heavy.
It was the weight of responsibility.
I spent my evenings reading the rest of her journal.
She wrote about her first husband,
who had died in a war I only knew from history books.
She wrote about the children she could never have,
and the loneliness that had settled into her bones like a cold winter.
"Then Elias came,"
she wrote in an entry dated mid-November.
"He is a liar,
yes.
He is looking for a way out of his pain.
But when he talks in his sleep,
he calls out for a mother who isn't there.
How can I be angry at a man who is just a ghost of himself?"
I closed the book and stared at the cracked ceiling of my room.
I had spent years thinking I was the one who was lonely,
the one who was suffering.
I never once stopped to ask her about her life.
I never asked her if she missed her husband,
or if she was afraid of the dark.
I had been so focused on her "clock" ticking down,
that I hadn't realized mine was ticking,
too.
I was twenty-five,
and I had spent the best years of my youth being a parasite.
I decided then that I would not let her investment in me go to waste.
I began to save every penny.
I stopped drinking.
I started going to the library,
reading books on finance and business,
things I had always ignored because I thought I would just "inherit" my way to success.
One night,
I found a small envelope tucked into the back cover of the journal.
It was addressed to "The Man Elias Will Become."
I didn't open it yet.
May you like
I didn't feel like that man.
Not yet.
