The Day(s) I Died {Book 1 - Completed}

21

whelve

(v.) to bury something deep; to hide

***

It is not often that I cry.

Even as a child, I learned quickly that crying would get me nothing but scoffs of annoyance and angry shouts of, "Shut up!"

(See what I mean? The experiences from the bad homes are far more ingrained in me than anything else. I know now that I am older that there are plenty of foster homes and orphanages that are welcoming and kind. It is too late for me, though; I am too old, and the damage was already done by the time I was seven.)

When I was ten and playing in the local park (unsupervised, because my foster father had no idea what else to do with me while he worked), I met another girl. She was younger than me by a year or two, shorter, and had dark eyes and hair.

Her name, if I recall correctly, was Erica.

Erica was very nice to me, unlike the two other children at the foster home, and I enjoyed playing with her. She wasn't at the park every day, though, so some days I spent by myself, hovering near the playground but not wanting to go on it until she could join me.

During my last weeks at the foster home, I didn't see Erica much.

When she came back, her skin was dark with a tan, her smile was blinding, but her hugs felt the same.

"I missed you, Vivi!" she had told me when we were finally reunited. "Did you have a good summer? We went on a cruise, and it was alright, but I scraped my knee," she pointed to her knee, where a large bandage covered most of the skin there, "and started crying, so that wasn't fun."

At the time, I remember thinking to myself, Why would you cry over that? Even at the age of ten, I had experienced my fair share of pain—both physical and emotional—and crying over something that seemed so insignificant was almost laughable.

Later, I asked Erica, "Do you cry a lot?"

She had stuck her tongue out me, though not unkindly. "Come on, Vivi!" she shook her head, as though I was the silliest thing she'd ever seen. "Everybody cries!"

But I hadn't cried then, and I have only cried a few times since.

(Old as I am now, I realize Erica was far more mature than most would have given her credit for at the time. She treated me like I was a person, which is far more than many of my foster parents and fellow orphans and classmates did for me.)

Perhaps, though, that is because I have rarely found a reason to cry—to sob and beg and plead for release from whatever is paining me.

Erica, after all, had a loving family and a wonderful life; to her, a scraped knee was probably terrifying and the most agonizing thing she'd ever faced.

Lying in the empty living room of the house, spread out on the dark, shaggy carpet with mere inches separating my right shoulder from Abel's left, I wonder if I might find that reason soon enough. Selah is already upstairs, and I can hear the light trilling of her voice as she sings along to the radio in her room.

Abel and I finished cleaning up the kitchen (Selah made pasta and butter, and both were delicious) and migrated into the living room in comfortable silence several minutes ago. He sat down on the carpet first, snagging one of the pillows we brought from my apartment to help support his hip before I joined him, flopping straight down on my back and staring up at the slowly spinning fan thoughtfully.

He mirrored my position after another minute, blowing out a relieved sigh when he stretched out his leg. We've remained in silence, but it is easy, and the noise of Selah's singing in the background serves to relax us both.