Bound To Be You

EMMA

  I’ve heard a couple of times that when in doubt, you should dye your hair and book a flight to your dream country and I wish that was my case. I stared at my reflection in my compact mirror, I looked different, more like a stranger to my own self. I'd never dyed my hair in the past and now, here I was sitting in the airport with a new identity. Technically, it’s not exactly a new identity, it’s my middle name and my mother’s surname. I wasn’t sure how long I was going to run away from facing the truth but I was just about to find out.

  Sometimes, I’d wonder what it felt like to have a normal family, to have people around who were just simply normal. Two days ago, I ran away from my own wedding. I’m twenty six and you’d think that I was old enough to choose my own husband and fall in love but that wasn’t the case for me. My father controlled my life ever since I was a child, the schools I attended, who I kept as my friends and who I even dated. The only thing he let me have was my journalism degree after I put up a great fight.

   I know my life sounds complicated but here’s the backstory, my name is Emmaline Genovese and I come from a very wealthy line of mafia. My father, Carlos Genovese took over the family’s business when he was thirty and he prided himself in what he did. When I was younger, he would say in passing how I was the next in line since I had no siblings. He had so many expectations for me and as you know I have failed him. When I became a journalist and started writing about petty crimes like stealing going on in our community, he was livid. He told me, without mincing words that no child of his was going to be a snitch.

   Now, it may sound like my father is so horrible but he’s not. I know for sure that he loved me so much and he had sacrificed so much for me but his obsession with the mafia and me taking over was what eventually made me run away. He arranged a wedding between me and the son of his old friend’s son. He believed that if we joined forces together, we would be unstoppable and stronger. My mother was a typical housewife, there wasn’t much she could do to change my father’s mind. My father would never let a woman make a decision for him. On the night of the wedding, she sent me a letter, a passport and some money all hidden in the layers of my wedding dress. She wanted me to go to her mother’s holiday home and hide there for a while until things were sorted out. It was the bravest thing I’ve seen my mama do and I was genuinely scared for her, if my father found out about it, he’d never forgive her.