The orange tree was in full blossom and the sun began to rise on the horizon. With the sun rising in front of me, tears streamed down my face as I thought about the memories that had occurred in the last twenty-four hours of my life. My mom and sister were dead. The fight with my dad had saved my life.

I haven’t always had a hard life, I wouldn’t even describe the recent events as hard. More so, tragic or unfortunate. Last year, with the death of my dad’s dad, things started to hit a rough patch.

That first week was the first sign of something wrong. Annie, my sister, and I had come home from school the day dad found him, he hadn’t bothered to come to get us. We came home to find dad slumped on the floor, reeking of booze. We couldn’t find mom anywhere, but we heard the soft cries coming from the bathroom. She laid on the floor, her eye was freshly blue, obvious a victim of a punching accident. We ignored it, because that’s when we learned about gramps.

From there it got worse. The death of his dad had brought out my father's worse traits. He started drinking. He would be gone for days at a time. The violence against her hadn’t ended. We would come home some days and she’d be locked away, refusing to see us, and dad would be nowhere in sight. He’d got physical with Annie and me before, but never resulting in hard punches, mostly just a push here and there.

The day he murdered them, I had come home from school by myself, Annie was sick and stayed home. I walked in and he was beating on mom, his fist bloody because of her battered body. Annie sat in the corner of the room, crying her eyes out, unable to be any help.

I wasn’t much bigger than him, but I had some size on me. I walked up to him and pushed him far away from mom, giving her enough time to get away to lock her and Annie in the bathroom.

He screamed at me, I can never forget the words, but I will not repeat them. He kicked me out, telling me that if I came back that he would shoot me. I thought with them in the bathroom, they would be safe, he would calm down. I knew that I would be doing nothing if I had been shot.

I crashed at a friend's house, them waking me in the earlier hours to tell me. From there I found this spot, the beautiful orange tree on the edge of the cliff. It’s hard, it really is.

My reasoning for finding this spot was the cliff. The beauty added, but it made me sick because of what I was going to do. It was really too beautiful for someone to kill themselves right now, but what else was there to do?