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❝ she needs to get her priorities straight. ❞
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GRIEF'S FIRSTBORN CHILD IS ANGER. She who storms from room to room, each window rattling in her wake, destruction is her middle name and she does not apologize for it. She will create a hurricane in your chest, a storm in your soul, and she will not release you until you shatter. Grief's second child is sadness. She who crawls inside your bones and stretches her graying hands until every part of you is compressed in this web of torment and despair. She will force tragedy into your bones, decay into your sinews, and she will stay until you learn how to wrench the knife out of your own spleen. Grief's youngest child is healing. She who mends broken souls with varnished gold, each crack glimmering in sunlight. You will ask her why and she will give you balm for your wounds, gentle rain for your spirit, she will tell you that what you have grieved was never meant to be forgotten. No matter how bad you wish it could.
It had been four months since Enola Gilbert had lost her parents in a tragic car accident. Unfortunately she happened to be in the vehicle when it happened along with her older twin sister. She had woken up in the back of an ambulance, coughing up the distasteful lake water that clogged her lungs. She was immediately met with a bone crushing hug from her sobbing sister. Apparently she had been dead for seven whole minutes. That is something like that can screw you up for life. And she was as screwed up as they came. Dying does that to a person. Now her trauma has a name. It sleeps beside her at night. It reminds her every morning of her shame. It watches as she swallows her pride. It snarls at her from the end of the grocery aisle. It sneers at her when she drives down that same abandoned road. It follows her from place to place, making her wish that she wasn't alive. That she had perished in that accident along with her parents. It hides in the living room. It buries holes in her chest. It makes her feel hopeless. Many times she was so close to falling apart, many times she barely held herself together. This terrible thing, this shrewd thing, tells her that she belongs to it. And she does. This miserable thing, this fragmented thing, tells her that she can't survive without it. She can't.
And just like that, the gut wrenching pain was back. Enola watched as her hand violently shook, her paintbrush stopping just inches away from the blank canvas. Someone could probably write a song with this rhythm stuck in the rigid linings of her sore muscles. Something sad, in a minor key that knows it could easily move into major. What caused this undertow? She had never been good at introspection—she swore she got every answer wrong on those stupid mental health surveys—and she could never go through with all the gore. Watch her, the scene she painted of herself staring off into the inky darkness until she collapsed. Watch her, this breaking point of a stuttering heartbeat in the beautiful symphony befitting deadly falls. The tempo soars as the hammer goes up, hovering above a skull, a bone, a wall, a metronome, and finally fades into darkness.
