A sharp gust of wind and a sudden ache in my back wake me.  I brush fallen strands of thinning hair away from my frostbitten cheeks and come to a familiar realization: I am alone.  A thin hand-me-down coat hugs my body tightly, but provides little forgiveness for the sin that is  New York City in January.  A shiver runs up my spine, and I hug my legs closely to my chest, my breath short and even, visible in the bitter air. It is hours until a glimpse of sunlight breaks through the thick dark clouds that hang above my head.  I sit upright on the wooden bench that I have called home for the past 12 hours, and perform my daily goodbye ritual.  Time to move again. I sling my daypack over my throbbing shoulders and begin walking in no certain direction.  Living on the streets teaches you things like that.  Having a destination isn’t always so important.  Nothing in the future is ever set in concrete.  Things change.  People lie.  Lives end.  But we keep walking on the road that is life, and pray to God that where we end up is somewhere better than where we started.
My name is Naya Evangeline Parker, but that isn’t important, and it never has been.  If I have been counting correctly, I am twenty-three years and four months old. I grew up in East Harlem, New York, in a neighborhood where “easy” does not exist.  I have never known ‘easy’. My father was like every other father in the area - an addict, a drunk, an embarrassment.  My presence was a burden to him, and each day I nudged him closer to his breaking point by simply existing. My mother always believed that one day, I would be the one to save us.  She once told me that the name “Naya” meant “renewal”, and I was to be her renewal.  I believed that I could be enough for her. But I failed my mother.  I failed her time and time again, until eventually she suffered the ultimate consequence at my hands.
I remember coming home with my brother as an 8-year-old, welcomed by the unmistakable stench of Coors Light and the agonizing sound of my mother’s sobs as my father beat her.  When all I could do as a little girl was mute my shrieks with my pillow, hug my knees to my chest and hope that she would be breathing when the sun rose the next morning. 
But I vividly recount my nights as a 15-year-old girl, and the deafening voices in my head yelling for me to stand up.  The voices louder than my mother’s cries.  The roaring in my ears that called for me to unbury my face from my pillow and let the neighborhood hear my screams. And one night, I listened.  I let the voices in my head guide my feet into the bedroom, where she lay curled in a ball on blood-stained sheets, weeping, shards of glass from a freshly broken beer bottle surrounding her.  Where my father leaned over her, spitting and bellowing unspeakable words over her decrepit body.  I remember unzipping my closed lips, fingertips trembling, the feeling of my heart pounding in my chest and ears as his bloodshot eyes met mine in the flickering yellow light.  The feeling of his hand on my cheek as he struck me.  The taste of blood like iron in my mouth as I bit my lip, my eyelids a crumbling dam holding back an ocean of tears. I can still hear the sound of the police sirens blaring in my eardrums, and the pounding on the door. My father’s shouts as unfamiliar men with unfamiliar faces carried my mother’s limp body to the door. I was a stone statue, unable to move, bound to the floor with an invisible chain composed entirely of my own guilt and despair. I did not renew my mother. I ended her.
I have tried to run from my past, but it seems that it can run much faster.  I have tried locking it in a box, but each time it morphs my fear and self-doubt into a skeleton key and frees itself.  I have tried to change it, tried to reverse it, but it is set in stone that I am not strong enough to break.  My past is an unstoppable force, and has started a war within me that I can no longer fight. Now, every night is a different Manhattan bench, every morning a new ache in my spine. Every day is another strenuous fight for survival, filled with the agony and dread of uncertainty.  But I have something. I have hope. So I continue to wander the streets of New York City, dreaming of the day that I become my own renewal.  My own fresh start.  But as I walk forward, the past grabs me by the shoulders with its cold hands, and as a shiver runs through my bones I am reminded that I cannot escape. You think you have gotten far enough away from the memories that haunt you, but there is danger in distance, and the past is a predator. It will hunt you down, and when it finds you, it will tear you to shreds.