The Way I Feel

Prologue.

Warnings for mentions of the loss of a family member and minor suicidal thoughts.

Death. The Dictionary calls it the permanent ending of vital processes in a cell or tissue. That's it. It reduces such a vast and complex experience to those few words. It makes it seem smaller, lacking the importance and the vile sort of emptiness. The way it eats away at you, your core, your soul, until you're all rotted away inside.

The not knowing whether it's better to experience it as a bystander or if it's better to go through it yourself. Right now, I'd rather it be me. Not her. I'd trade places, like everyone wishes they could in a situation like this.

But it's not me. It's not my time. It should have been though. All those weeks ago, it should have been me and not her. Then I wouldn't have to go through this. This pain that sits so heavy inside me, weighing me down like a boulder in my gut. It feels like it'll never lift. Like it's there and not leaving, and I'm left to deal with that. Without her. But if it were me and not her, then she'd be here in my place.

She'd be staring down at my lifeless shell of a body instead of me staring down at hers. She'd be questioning herself, wracking her brain over and over to scrounge together some sort of explanation as to why I'm gone. Why the heat has left my body like a gust of wind just plucked it out. Why my mind is empty and my existence will soon be nothing other than pictures, videos, and an expensive fucking headstone that solidifies everything even more than it's already been solidified. I'm gone. Dead. No longer able to experience this fucked up thing we call life.

But it's not me. In my head it is. And she's still here. But out here, the here that doesn't live in my head, where things are as real as the pain reminds me they are, she's the one in the casket. She's the one who's wearing foundation that's so not her shade and I'm wishing I could go back. Go back to when I was young, and all her girly things like her bright red lipstick and her flowery perfumes made me feel something. They made me feel safe. Made me feel like I had a home.

Now I feel nothing. Nothing other than that weight I can't seem to lift. That weight that presses on my heart, at an angle that cracks it down the middle just a little every time it beats, knowing it shouldn't. Wishing it couldn't.

But I'm here. Now. And it's sickening even to acknowledge how much I don't want to be.

But I am. God I am. And I can't leave because no matter how hard I try, I can't stop thinking how pale she looks. How she would hate those earrings. How I can't see her eyes, those bright, blissful blues. Those blues that stare back at me in the mirror because she just had to give them to me. That fact used to make me happy. It used to remind me of her and how hers were never without that distinct sparkle.

Mine aren't hers. They never will be. Because that sparkle, it meant she was happy. It always did. And mine will never have a sparkle like that. She isn't here to give it to me anymore.

I long to see them again, to get lost in them. But I can't. They're closed, or just not there. Hell if I know. All I have is the memory of them. That's not enough though, and it never will be. I need them. I need her. Just like my lungs need their next breath of oxygen. Just like an addict needs their next fix.

I need her now, and the weight feels even heavier when my mind tells me I can't have her. Everything else tells me a different story. My heart especially tells me that she's ok. That she'll be here tomorrow when I wake up, cooking breakfast and looking almost ethereal with her golden hair glowing in the morning light. But that's just because it's breaking. It doesn't know what's true and what it's been taught to feel constantly all my life. Like her. Her love. Just her presence. That was permanent. My heart doesn't know any better. Not now.

Not when I can feel everyone in this room subtly watching me, pitying me because this pain is unimaginable. At least for them it isn't. At least they don't even have to imagine it. But me? I have to experience it. I have to live with it. And their pity only makes me not want to even more.

Their pity and their hushed conversations about the boy whose mother was so "kind" and "loving." But they don't have to keep telling me that, as if it's any comfort. It only makes me want to join her, so I can have the chance to feel how familiar her kindness and her love once were. To know that those things still exist inside her somewhere.

They're still whispering now, when I have to force my eyes away from her. I could feel the fifth round of tears heating the backs of my eyes just from her expression. Where is her smile? Her sweet smile that could light up a room. She looks so drab. So boring. So lifeless. In fact, she's not the only lifeless thing in this room. Everything looks lifeless, at least to me. My heart pangs at the thought of how just that smile would change my mind. How that smile would give life to this fucking funeral.

But it can't. Because she's dead. And I'm still here, broken heart still beating behind my ribs. I'm the one that has to deal with the whispers. The apologies, like it was their fault and not the sickness that consumed her until she had nothing left. I have to put up with the onslaught of rage inducing fucking pity.

And now I'm the one that's crying for the fifth time today, and my mind is full of how the first four times I was thinking about the exact same thing I'm thinking about now.

My mother is dead, and as much as I want there to be, there is nothing I can do about it other than to live with it.