I cannot have a conversation with my mother without it turning into a full-fledged war of words. I am smothered by all the accusations of ingratitude, insinuations of incompetence, silken sighs of resignation that only thinly veil her contempt for all the ambitions and expectations I haven't met. I cannot live with a mother who cannot hide that she needs to steel herself- a tiredness, an agitated impatience fleets across her countenance, she inhales sharply- whenever I open my mouth to speak, as if in anticipation of the stupidities that I will utter shortly. I cannot stand having conversations in which she hears what she wants to hear and not what it is I am saying. "Will you shut up and listen to what I am saying?", I grimace in the end, when I can take her chiding my invisible alter ego no longer, and that she hears, and that I realize is the person she has been speaking to for the last, what is it, 20, 30 minutes? I don't think she can even see me anymore. I know I must leave this house, leave this country, leave a mother who no longer knows me and a father who openly despises me, not only in order to save myself but to keep together what shreds of family ties remain, be as far away as possible from the noxious fumes that are smothering all of us. I count the days. I have two more years of this purgatory to live through. "Help me", said the note pinned to his chest when they turned him over.