Some things never change. A leopard’s spot, a zebra’s stripes, my mother’s hatred toward my father. She let him destroy her, and she took me down with her. It wasn’t until I was older that I truly understood her grief. She let it build within her, like a fire that threatened to take everything around her down, and that included me. She burned me when she self-destructed. I tried to understand her and her pain. I know he cheated. I know he slept with his boss, a man she could never compete with. But I never understood how she could torch everything and everyone around him. Around us. I was just a child, but she ripped me from the only home I had ever known. Before I even knew what had happened, we were sneaking away under the cover of night, slinking across the mountains that border my old hometown and my new home. Or at least I thought this would be my new home.

A new home usually meant change. And we did change. A little bit. We changed our names. We changed our backgrounds. We even rewrote the narrative on how my father died. But she never changed. Her hatred grew, and she eventually took it out on me. She abandoned me for days at a time just so she wouldn’t have to recognize that I am my father’s son. We looked alike, laughed alike, and had that same hero’s complex she found disgusting. I devoted myself to being who I thought my father was, a selfless man who gave his life trying to save the lives of innocent bystanders. I tried to be as good of a person as I could be, just to spite her.

One day, he found her. My mother had an accomplice. He was a gun-for-hire known as the Phantom. He found us in a cute little café a few blocks from the Eiffel Tower. I recognized the scar on his neck from when he gave us our new names almost a decade prior. I can’t recall much of that day. I was only a teenager then. But I recall the color draining from my mother’s face, almost like her fire had been extinguished. Somehow we slipped away without him noticing. Somehow we got out of the country.

Despite our best efforts, he found us a year later in New York. I’ve spent almost half my life trying to forget what he did to her. My mother was gone, just like my father, but I refuse to run from the Phantom anymore. I’m tired of finding new homes. I guess you could say some things never change, but I’m determined to break the cycle…