Suicide Buddies

An Angel Young Christmas

(hi tysm for reading, vote if u do so wish, :)

I sat on the edge of the ambulance, my elbows on my knees, and waited for my mother.

It was a strange thing when someone you knew died. There was something infinitely haunting about seeing an alive thing suddenly unalive. It was as if the person you just hugged turned into a rock. Like the conversation you were having was suddenly through a wall. There and gone, just like that.

I couldn't imagine my mother dead. Even when the back of my hand grazed her only to feel the winter concrete that was her skin, when the blood had been stemmed and her veins were giving out.

My mother was river wild and bright. My mother was beautifully real. My mother could not be dead.

People didn't die and disappear. People died and lingered, haunted and repeated. People died and left tracks, crumbs, syllables, ideas. Ghosts were made by regrets.

Neighbors watched us with peculiar eyes, wondering what all the commotion was for. I sat, hands folded. My father stood away. My mother lay behind me.

"Hey, kid."

I looked up. A paramedic stared down at me—seemingly pityingly, maybe just forlorn. His gloves were dotted with blood. He handed me a towel for my still-damp hair. "It's cold out," he said. "Wet hair and you'll catch a fever."

I left it in my hands.

He said, "Are you all right?"

What a cruel question. What an earnest one.

"Where are you taking her?" I asked him.

"Somewhere safe."

"Is she gonna be okay?" Cruel. Earnest. Desperate.

His stare was crippled. He sighed.

"We need you and your dad out here," he dodged. "So we can take care of your mom, okay? Your dad has a change of clothes for you."

I swallowed. The cold seeped deep into my bones, but all I could do to withstand it was shake and shiver and hate the blood still on my shirt and pants that wouldn't come out without my mother there to know how to wash it. My mother would know my mother knows better—

The world was a nightmare.

"I wanna go with," I said.

"Seohyun," my father called. "We have to go."

"We'll go with."

"Stop. Let's go."

I shook my head. "No," I said. "Appa, we can't leave her."

The medic crouched in front of me. "I'm sorry, hon," she said. "But she can't stay here."

"Why not?" I snapped, but I was thirteen and not an idiot and I knew, but more so, I just didn't want to. I didn't think I'd survive if someone said it aloud.

Maybe that's why I dared her to.

I shook my head. "We have to stay with her. Where is she even going? The hospital?"

"I'm sorry, kid," he said. "You'll see her again, we just—"

"No." My lungs palpitated. "No."

The medic reached to close the door but I shoved it back. He didn't fight me on it, only holding out her hand for me.

"Calm down, it's okay," he said. "We're not—"

"We have to go with her," I said to my father. "You can't leave her. You can't leave her."

He grabbed my arm. "Seohyun, enough—"