Letters To Harry

12 - Love, ____

I couldn't breathe.

"What do you mean?" I whispered, barely able to form words.

Her eyes were brimming with tears, but she brushed them away impatiently.

"I'm so sorry Harry!" she exclaimed, "Here, this should explain it all."

She shoved an envelope into my grasp.

I watched as she turned and ran across the park towards a cab without so much as a final glance back at me.

I must have stood there on the bridge for a good 10 minutes holding on to the envelope and wondering what to do with it. I finally decided that, no matter what happened, I wanted to know what the truth was.

There was a bench next to the pond, so I walked over and took a seat on it. The envelope was thick and tightly sealed. I took a deep breath, opened it, and unfolded the papers inside. The script was messy, as if she had written it without her full focus, and parts of the paper were wet. I started to read...

Dear Harry,

I have been staring at this sheet of paper for over an hour, trying to figure out what to tell you. I've made a choice : I'm going to tell you everything.

One of my very first memories was playing in the backyard of the house where my sister was born. I was in the sandbox with my brother and my dad was throwing a tennis ball for our dog to chase. I was about three or four years old, and I couldn't have been any happier. That feeling is easy to remember, but not so to replicate.

When I was seven, my family moved and I started school. I found some other people who I loved hanging out with and we became friends.The girls ; Holly, Marissa, Leanne, Nikki, Kaia and Mary. Also Thomas, Riley and Matthew. Today, I'm only friends with Marissa still. The rest have all hurt or abandoned me. Mary, Holly and Kaia stopped talking to me after elementary graduation. Leanne started dating my ex exactly one week after we broke up. Nikki told everyone about my sixth grade eating disorder. Thomas blamed a drug deal that he was involved with on me and almost got me expelled. Riley has given me enough grief to hate myself every day for nine years. Matthew was my first boyfriend, and also the cause of one of my first eating disorders.

The summer after I turned 14 was the first summer where I wore long sleeves every day. I got into a fight with my dad on the evening of July 24th. I locked myself in the bathroom with one of his razor blades and drew it across my wrist until my whole arm went numb. That was the first night of many more to follow.

I went through a period of time that Fall when I felt like the world would really be better off without me. My family didn't do much to help. Frequent phrases I heard from my brother and sister were :

- nobody cares about you

- I wish you were never born

- I'll gladly plan your funeral

- just kill yourself already

- I don't give a shit about your life

- I hope you don't wake up tomorrow

I hadn't realized until that year how badly my dad was treating us. He made my mum cry most days, forces guilt trips on all of us, disregarded my brother's epilepsy and basically treated me like crap. The only one he seemed to care about was my little sister who he treated like she was treasured gold.

I told my mum that I wanted them to get a divorce. She had overlooked a lot of things he'd done, having not been treated well anyways growing up. So she started standing up to him and our house got a whole lot louder. He didn't want to admit that he was a problem which made the whole situation even more difficult.