Concentrated power has always been the enemy of liberty. (Ronald Reagan)

I realized the power of a gun that day and when I considered how many guns were at our house I realized my family must be pretty powerful. I started to look at our life more critically. I started to assess the people in my classes at school. I was suddenly very aware of how different my family was.

I thought I was better than the others. My clothes were nicer and newer. I didn’t have to take the bus. Someone was always waiting to pick me up after school in a car that cost as much as most of the teachers grossed in a year. People treated me with respect. No one ever butted in front of me in the cafeteria line. When I raised my hand in class other people would even take theirs down so I could be picked. They had been warned about me by someone but I wasn’t sure who exactly. Even the teachers seemed to have an element of fear when it came to me. No one dared to cross me. I liked it and I got carried away with the power.

Before I was out of elementary school I was commanding the student body as if it were a dictatorship. I was raised by men with addictive personalities and whether it was inherited physically or mentality, once I got a taste of what it was like to be in a position of power I was addicted. I devoted my life to it. Drugs were the downfall of my father and uncle. I watched them get high and dumb and thought that I would never be like them, not because of any sort of moral implications, I just didn’t like the idea of losing control of my body.

Knowledge is power, so I decided to be as intelligent as possible. My mother adored the library so I would go with her but I would never go to the children’s section. I would find atlases, encyclopaedias, dictionaries, and biographies – I loved biographies. I was grasping at the best of times to understand what I was reading but I understood enough to know that I was learning. My mother thought it curious, but she smiled and encouraged me to read and learn.

My mother was amazing. Everyone in our house had a profound respect for my mother, perhaps just because she put up with their nonsense. She was kind to the maid and helped out around the house more than she had to. She was sweet, much nicer than I ever was or ever will be, but she always looked tired. My father never slept while my mother kept regular hours, but she was the one who always looked tired. Maybe she was tired of living with boys, maybe she was tired of pretending she had no family of her own, maybe she was just physically tired, I never figured that out but I remember seeing her face change. It was perfect and pure and angelically pale but as I got older I watched it get wrinkled and lumpy. She was still beautiful but her face wasn’t as soft and wasn’t as young. She aged faster than she should have. She was becoming an old lady while she was still a young woman. But my father didn’t seem to notice. He looked at her as if she was the only woman in the world. I envied that, not in a malicious way, but I envied the way he admired her because she was the only person – the only woman anyway – I knew who was treated better than I was. She was more respected, more beautiful, more gentle, more compassionate, more knowledgeable, more spiritual, and more loved than I was. I began to realize that all the traits that she excelled in over me all combined to make her more powerful. What was frustrating about this was that she didn’t care about power. She was content to be poor, ignorant, and utterly forgettable as long as she had her family. When I say her family I mean my father and me not the family she knew before us. She gave up even them to be with us. There’s something to be said for sacrifice but I didn’t learn lessons in sacrifice until I was much older.