River Marzen WIP

Personality: Usually appears pretty confident and calm in social situations but one on one she sort of shuts down

Mentality: It's all gotta mean something

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River was the definition of "it takes a village to raise a child." She had a huge extended family that gathered for every holiday, birthday, Sunday, and randomly throughout the week. Her aunts and uncles were always there and all of her cousins were more like siblings even though they lived in different houses. Her parents both worked full time but if they weren't able to be around because they were at work or doing something else there were always a dozen people available that could make sure that young River was never left alone. She grew up knowing how to be social and enjoying the constant action. She was a hyperactive child and having people her own age as well as adults helped to keep her calm.

As she got older her family was all pretty set on getting her into some kind of sports to keep her busy and active. She needed the source of constant focus and release if she was going to get anywhere or accomplish anything. She tried basketball, baseball, football, track... She was good at most of them once she got the rules down but none of them were as fun or as much of a work out for her as soccer. She joined when she was in middle school and became obsessed with it and played either in school, out of school, or both for what felt like forever after that. She loved the thrill of competing and was determined to learn every position on the field.

In high school, River was popular. She hung out with the people from her soccer team because of how easy it was to talk to them. When you spent hours together before school, after school, and on weekends it was this weird unspoken rule that you had to spend hours together at school too. When she tried to branch out to meet new people she found out it was easy for her. She was confident and suave and everybody seemed to want to be her friend. She got along with almost everybody and the people she didn't really like she just stayed away from.

River discovered her sexual orientation when she was in high school. She always knew she found girls attractive but assumed it was the same for every other girl. It wasn't until one of the seniors took her to one side at a party and introduced her to the things that she realized just how attractive she found them. Still, she lived in a small enough town that being gay wasn't widely accepted and not something she wanted associated with herself. So she kept it under wraps and even idly dated a couple of guys, but that never went on for too long. Eventually they would both realize that she was just "one of the guys" and they would move on to the next hot thing that stepped in their path. She didn't even have to act heartbroken about it.

It wasn't until her own senior year when she met her one and only high school sweetheart that it became clear why she couldn't live like that. She started dating Sarah early in the year and by the end of it, their relationship was rock solid. She loved this girl. They had both applied to the same college which was only about a half hour from home and both gotten accepted. Sarah was the brainy type and wanted to go to college for about eight years total but River just wanted to go and ride out her soccer scholarship. Somehow they both managed to convince their respective families to help pay for them to live off campus in a little two bedroom townhouse. They just had to keep their grades up and stay focused.

River's parents had a lot of other rules too. They were a bit more strict than Sarah's parents. Luckily the rules were easy enough to follow. Weekly video calls with her parents, curfew at 9pm (which was easy when the person you wanted to be with the most was already waiting at your house), no drinking, no drugs. The last two were easy for the straight laced River but she quickly discovered that it was harder for Sarah. She wasn't a party girl but she did like to go out at least once a month and would come crawling in drunk. It was strange but River didn't think anything of it until it started happening every weekend, and then every week, and then every day.

Sarah's alcoholism destroyed River. She wasn't as open or bubbly, she didn't laugh or make anybody else laugh, she never went anywhere that wasn't school and home, and she started isolating so bad even her parents noticed despite the weekly calls. She struggled every time Sarah was out as she realized she had no way of knowing where her girlfriend was or if she was safe. It started to get more and more difficult to wake her up from the drunken stupors and she wasn't sure if that was the alcohol or a worse underlying problem.

The abuse started once the alcoholism reached its peak. It was verbal for a few months but eventually it became physical soon after that. River would never fight back. She just couldn't wrap her head around the thought that anybody could physically strike somebody they loved. The beatings only got worse, and then there was the crying in the morning as Sarah begged for forgiveness and understanding. It went on for way too long.

She wasn't sure what was different that night. Sarah pulled a knife on her but that wasn't the first time. She heard every nasty word in her girlfriend's vocabulary but there wasn't anything new. She felt defeated, numb, and completely alone, but those feelings had lingered around her for weeks at the very least. Whatever the reason, when Sarah hit her with a balled fist right in the cheek, River reached up and backhanded her. She sent her drunk girlfriend into the counter and then watched her slide down to the kitchen floor. She reached up and grabbed her keys. She had a bag packed in her back seat that had been there for months just in case she ever got brave enough to leave.

She got in her car and started to drive. She wasn't totally sure where she was going. She couldn't go home. She would have to explain that Sarah was more than just a friend and that they had been living in their love nest and letting their parents pay for them for over a year. She didn't really know anybody else anymore. So she just drove and drove. She burned through an entire tank of gas and it was her second one that got her to a little town outside of Telluride.

River went to the only place in town that sounded like it could help her: the church. They offered her room and board for as long as she needed, offered to let her call her family even though she refused, and even gave her a room with a locking door. She wasn't sure what she was expecting but she got swept up in their kindness. She barely realized it when a couple of days turned into a couple of weeks. Days started blurring together. The food they fed her started tasting different and it was hard to tell when she was asleep or when she was awake.

The call to leave was so overwhelming one night that she lay there half dreaming and staring at the ceiling. She wasn't sure what was going on in her head or if she could even move. She thought she heard another voice muttering to her but that was impossible. She sat straight upright in bed, some light right above her head giving off a soft glow that was enough for her to get dressed by. When she left, she left behind everything. She started wandering almost idly towards Telluride and even still it took almost a full day of walking for her to get there.

It took some time but she managed to build something for herself. She worked at a little family owned restaurant and lived in the apartment above it, mostly for free. She had a small box of clothes and a couple of knick knacks. She could almost start to feel normal again... if it weren't for the constant nightmares that seemed to bleed more and more into her daily life, or the PTSD that kept showing just how bad it was at the worst moments. She was bound and determined to get her life back on track. Maybe one day she would even reach out to her family.

Maybe.