(hi thanks for reading, vote if you'd like, gracias)
I met Death for the first time when I was twelve.
My mother and father were at my side along with a few of my extended family, standing silent where the casket sat open. It was silver, inlaid with pink cushions, with a large array of roses atop the bottom half lid. In it, lay my mother's mother.
"What happened to halmoni?" I asked my mom when we sat down across from it.
My mom stroked my hair with reddened eyes. "Halmoni isn't here anymore, Angel."
"Why not?"
"She's just not."
My mother hated repeating herself, so I didn't ask any further questions, but it still ate away at the back of my mind. What could've happened to her? Where did she go? Would she come back?
"Sleeping," I said instead.
"Yes, sure," my mom replied, even if I didn't ask. "Sleeping."
I folded my hands and smiled at the open casket, waiting for her to wake up. Waiting and waiting.
When we drove home that night, and my mother abandoned herself to the bedroom with locked doors and no dinner, my father stood in my doorway. Hard lines and tired face.
I patted the covers over my body and said, "Is halmoni awake?"
My father looked away, grasping the door handle.
"Halmoni is dead," he said plainly, because my father didn't always tell the truth, but he never lied.
He shut my door before I could say more to that.
I cried all the way through that night, sniffling into my blanket and hugging myself in hopes it would will away the ache in my stomach. I'd heard the word in passing, in books and movies and shows, where it fell on oblivious ears.
Death stared me in the face now. Death had wormed its way into my life without me even knowing, insidious and irreversible.
My father never came back in, and neither did my mother. The next morning, they were quiet and only said things when absolutely necessary. My mother pushed me into class, barely waved on her way out. When she did get into her car, I saw her hands bury her face and her shoulders shake.
As I greeted my teacher with a solemn wave, I saw myself shrink. It wasn't that my tragedy wasn't a real tragedy, but it was that everyone else's was much more real than mine ever would be. Death hit children quietly, brushed past them and left damaged memories with a dull ache. Death hit adults suddenly, with a painful vigor that shook them awake.
When my father picked me up instead that day, I asked him, "Appa, is Umma sad?"
He said, "Put your seatbelt on."
And like every other question of my life, it disappeared onto the road.
My mother, my father, could not see me past themselves. And maybe that could be selfish or human. Semantics. But it wouldn't matter, not to them or me. I would never get answers and they would never give them. We'd go into our respective spaces, and I would watch them from afar, wondering when they would come back to me and ask me a question, too.
Some tragedies bled more than others.
I know at least that much. I'd seen it for myself.
_____________________________
Whoever this Haruki kid was, I was not having it.
YOU ARE READING
Suicide Buddies
Teen Fiction"My mother once told me there are three, and only three, truly defining moments in your life. One: When you don't know. Two: When you realize you don't know. Three: When you know. This is about the third one." --- Angel Young is going to die. Or at...
