Dwayne Ackley Stories

I’m always afraid of losing things, which is sad because I’m so good at it.  I have a tendency to change gears very quickly from task to task without finding a good spot to leave what I was working on originally.

When I was little I used to carry around toy trucks in my hands and take them everywhere. Sometimes my hands were so full I couldn’t balance myself well enough to walk through doors. I also used to fall asleep holding on to my all my metal toy trucks and cars.  After a night of rolling around in my sleep my legs would have indentations from those and the small cars that I stuffed in my pockets. If I didn’t pass out from exhaustion I wouldn’t fall asleep.

Even then my reasoning was based on my habit of losing things. I knew that my mother didn’t have money so when I lost something I also was always aware that I would never get it back.

Unfortunately toys and distraction were my only break from the insanity at home. Television, church, movies, and my friends at school, and the lessons in my school textbooks showed me what I didn’t have. I was willing to believe in anything that gave me clemency from the prison of reality.

I came by these habits honestly though.  My mom was lost in a world of ghosts surrounded by a reality that she distrusted.  When I lived with her she would talk all the time about the past.  There were moments where she would cry about her illness asking me to comfort her and others when she would scream at me because she forgot that she asked me to help her in the kitchen minutes before.

My life has been a constant reach for change in order to outrun someone else’s eventual escape. At least until 13 years ago.

Thirteen years ago my son and then two years later my daughter gave me a reason to build stability instead of driving through conflict sporadically. I am grounded in a way that I never was before.

The struggle now is to show my children the life I always wanted to see in other people. A life that you never want to run from and that you never have to fear losing.