I Have a Jar of Wishes I Have Been Writing Since I was Five: A Survivor Story.

By Gerta Kapllani

Be careful what you wish for.

It might end up becoming real. But what about when the real becomes too real? When you are tired of living the real and you hold onto dreams—hold onto wishes that you hope to somehow change the real reality you find yourself stacked in each and every day. When you are so young and already feeling like running out of time.

When you can’t wait to go to bed, to your little heaven where dreams carry you to the world of happiness. You fly to a world where you feel loved—far away from the lie you are forced to live. You are sick and tired of fights all day and all night.

He screams and yells at her, sometimes hitting her so badly that she can’t even breathe. She is on the floor crying again (so fragile).

Another night, another nightmare. Until the sun comes up and you have to live another day hoping for better. So you start spending your life wishing it all away.

You wish you could do something to make your mother happy and see her smile again. She has been both a mother and a father to you the whole time, struggling and fighting to keep alive a marriage that is dead, while allowing her own happiness to be killed in the process. Allowing her own life to be destroyed, while trying to save a broken family because the world doesn’t have to know.

Wishes are sometimes all you have when you have nothing at all.

Wishes are your only light in the darkness. They are your prayer in the desperate hour, your medicine, your peace against the war you are living because you have no other choice. Because today you are been told you are too small—too small to understand, too small to act.

You wish for a home but all you get is a house.

He says shut up and hits you against the wall until you touch the floor and then, now your wish is to not get up from there anymore. But your wishes don’t count.

Every Christmas your one and only wish is to be big—so big that you can’t be hit anymore. Big enough to keep your mother safe. Big enough so there won’t be tears anymore (because grown-ups don’t cry, right?).

So big that he will be small. Big enough to show him what you really mean. But you are too small to understand (but you do understand it all too well, much more than you should).

To think that now you should only dance in your pj-s and believe in Cinderella stories with happy endings. Some nights remind me that I am still small and I may never grow up at all—I guess my soul doesn’t want to. The puzzle of my life has some missing pieces from yesterday.

But yesterday is gone.

Today is here and now I am big for real. I am all grown up but the bruises are here to stay anyway.

I have a jar of wishes I have been writing since five.

I remember a silly Friday when my friend Leslie and I were playing the wishing game on the kitchen floor. While looking beyond the horizon she says, “I wish I had eaten ice cream. My father has never allowed me to eat it. I did never try it, never ever tasted. So I started to hate it. You know, you start to hate things you can’t have.”

I tell her, “Such a pity! I am glad I had no father.”

“What do you mean? You have a father…” she answers.

“Yeah, I guess I have one, I never get to know.”

I said this because he was the one in the picture in the living room. The one I had always been afraid of. The one who did never loved or supported me enough so I could love myself. The one who use to sign the parental permission letter every time without even reading it. All I can say is that he is just someone who reminds me of my broken pieces, of my permanent scars.

He reminds me all time of his absence in my life and why you should never break a child’s dreams. He reminds me how to fake the alright, how to accept reality but not be killed by it. How to get by and move on.

Mostly his face reminds me to never forget why I started, no matter how it will end up.

The wishing game has always been the hardest to play with my friends. I have never been good at and I have never wished to win. I have never been brave enough to read my wishes out loud.

“I am sorry,” she said then, “I didn’t know..Wish I could… Your turn. What do you wish for?”

“I wish…tomorrow could be as peaceful and sunny as today was. Tomorrow I don’t want to have 60 seconds spent wishing about yesterday in a minute of a life I will never get back.”

Gerta Kapllani is a girl from Albania. Her biggest passions are communication and writing. She is in love with details and feels they are what make the biggest difference in life. She also loves music, travelling, fashion and being classy, and is definitely an animal lover. To Gerta, the safest place in this world are in her mother’s arms, where she finds peace and serenity. She considers herself a harmony of contrasts and believes that a beautiful life is composed of big dreams, good music and expensive tastes!