What A Ten Year Old Carries

By the time I turned ten, childhood had already started slipping through my fingers.

The glowing green man was no longer something I saw, but something I remembered something that lived quietly in the back of my mind. Mandy’s visit stayed with me too, not as confusion, but as proof. Proof that love didn’t always disappear just because something ended.

Those memories didn’t haunt me, exactly.

They waited.

Like bookmarks in a story I wasn’t ready to finish.

Home was different now.

Tense.

Heavy.

My parents were in the middle of a divorce, though at ten years old I didn’t understand the legal meaning of that word. I only understood raised voices, slammed doors, and the way the air changed when arguments started. I learned quickly how to read moods how to listen for footsteps, how to sense when something bad was coming.

There was a new life in the house too.

My little brother was three. Innocent. Too young to understand why voices got loud or why rooms suddenly went quiet. Too young to know fear the way I already did. I watched him closely, instinctively, like it was my job to make sure he stayed untouched by whatever was breaking around us.

Sometimes the fighting became more than words.

I don’t remember every detail, and maybe that’s a mercy. What I do remember is stepping in when I shouldn’t have had to placing myself between anger and someone who didn’t deserve it. I was a big kid for my age, tall and solid, and in those moments that mattered. Not because I wanted it to, but because it had to.

I wasn’t trying to be brave.

I was trying to protect my mother.

I learned then what it meant to feel fear and responsibility at the same time. To shake on the inside while standing firm on the outside. To become something other than a child because the situation demanded it.

My brother would cry sometimes, confused, clinging to whatever felt safe. I remember looking at him and realizing how unfair it all was that he didn’t understand, and I understood too much.

At night, when the house finally went quiet, I’d lie awake thinking about the doorway again. About the green man. About Mandy. About how some things watched, some things protected, and some things hurt the people they were supposed to love.

I didn’t see anything supernatural during those years.

But I felt things.

The house carried tension the same way haunted places do like the walls remembered what happened inside them. Like emotions soaked into the air and never quite left. I didn’t have the language for it then, but looking back, I recognize the feeling clearly.

It was the same heaviness.

The same awareness.

That was when I started realizing the world wasn’t divided into safe and unsafe places it was divided into places where pain was spoken aloud, and places where it was swallowed.

And I was very good at swallowing it.

I carried the memories quietly. The glowing green man. Mandy’s voice. The sound of arguments behind closed doors. The weight of stepping in when I shouldn’t have had to. All of it stacked inside me, layer by layer, shaping something I didn’t yet understand.

I didn’t know it then, but those years were teaching me how to stand in uncomfortable spaces. How to stay alert. How to protect without being seen.

Skills I would one day use again.

Just not in the way I expected.