Celeste's childhood wasn't something she loved talking about. It was filled with nothing but painful memories. Whether they were the ones from when her father, along with her brothers, left, or the ones from her mother's death and her stepfather's a...
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I FELT sick. My stomach churned, twisting in painful knots. My chest felt too heavy like someone had dropped the entire world on top of it. Everything ached.
My throat and my heart were both on a fire I was incapable of settling down. My lungs were using all of the power they owned to grasp the tiniest ounces of Oxygen and to drag them into their depths. It seemed like they failed, considering the way I was gasping for air in between my silent sobs.
Time passed slowly. The seconds turned into minutes and then to hours, but that took too long. Every single moment felt like forever. Like an eternity.
I didn't know if I had stopped crying at all ever since I had watched the video. Or I did. I had only stopped crying once my twin came to sleep. I had pretended to be asleep, choking all my sobs back. I didn't know if he noticed. But if he did, he had chosen to remain quiet. Which was exactly what I had wanted.
I had waited for him to fall asleep, and I had come to the bathroom right after he did, locking myself in. My body had collapsed against the door, and my head had buried into my hands. Silent sobs had racked through my body, and I had let them, not finding the power to hold them back.
I couldn't understand the reason to why I had been crying this hard. I already knew that my mother had overdosed, and I already knew that Jack was the one to get her the drugs she wanted all the time. She would ask, giving him the money, and he would get her whatever she wanted. Why was I acting like this was something I had never known? Why did it still hurt so much?
I dug so deeply for an answer to each of the questions but found none. The pain intensified, and my hands tugged at my hair in frustration. I cried harder at the thought that had crossed my mind, and I let the guilt consume my entire heart.
Everything could have been different if I had stopped my mother from going to Jack, and everything would have been different if I had tried to stop her from taking the drugs. I could have hidden her money away or perhaps hidden the drugs themselves. I could have stopped her from hurting herself. But I had failed her.
I had watched her crumble a little more with every single day that passed. I had seen her hunger for the poison killing her increase with every moment. It was as though it made her feel alright, took her pain, and tossed it all away, so far from her reach. That might have been what she wanted. But that was never what I wanted—what my younger self wanted.
I wanted her pain to vanish. Yes. I hated seeing my mother in pain, and I hated seeing the life drain from her eyes. But I never wanted her pain to vanish that way—through drugs. If my five-year-old self had known that her mother didn't become magically happy overnight, she would have done all she could to stop her. She would have tried, at least.
But she was too oblivious. Too naive to realise that her mother wasn't happy; to predict that her mother would die eight years from now due to an overdose on the same magic pill that had made her smile for the first time in what seemed like a lifetime.
