Basorexia - J.MAGUIRE

[3.55] melancholy

Chip woke with a cloudy daze of melancholy already covering her eyes and thoughts. She frowned, wondering why she had woken up in such a foul mood, until she glanced at the calendar. Sometimes the body just knew what the mind had dug deep down. The anniversary of her brother's death.

There were particular days where the grief just got to be too much, days where it felt like the inability to breath was far gone and would never yet return. Those were days like Christmases, birthdays or random anniversaries that didn't mean so much at the time but now mean absolutely everything. There were of course the odd days, where a certain smell or thing would bring back a memory and that day would be weighed down into the depths of grief again. Chip hadn't had one of those days in a while, maybe a couple weeks, so the returning swooping grief that arrived with the anniversary had her feeling particularly worse than usual.

Ciara knew that her Mammy would be worse off than she was today so she forcibly pulled herself from her bed, tugged a blanket over her shoulder, then headed downstairs. As she suspected, her Mammy was sat at the kitchen table with a cup of tea that was full but stone cold. Chip silently took it away and replaced it with a fresh one and a piece of her usual toast, hoping that she would at least eat something. Chip made her usual meal plan meal and sat opposite her Ma, eating despite the sickened feeling that bubbled in her stomach. Chip's phone rang distantly upstairs but she didn't make the effort to go and answer it, having hardly heard it over her own thoughts in the first place.

"Shall we go see him today?" she suggested softly after she had finished her breakfast, frowning at the still untouched piece of toast in front of her Ma. "Da too?"

Her Mammy nodded once, looking up with eyes completely void of emotion, before she rose from her seat and headed upstairs. Chip cleared away her plate and poured the tea back down the sink, not quite knowing what the point of even making it had been in the first place.

As she slowly headed up the stairs, Ciara's ears became more and more tuned in on the sound of her Mammy's sobs from her bedroom. A small part of her died at the sound of them and, as tears came to her eyes, she shut her bedroom door and drowned out the sound with the first record she laid her fingertips on. Chip got ready pretty quickly, deliberately choosing the most comforting clothing that she owned as she knew her Mam was likely to be wordless all day.

Her phone began to blare out its usual tune for the second time of the day. This time she heard it and felt compelled to pick it up, even though she didn't particularly want to talk to anyone. She cleared her throat, running a hand through her hair, "Aye?"

"It's Orla."

Ciara frowned, beginning to rock back and forth on her feet, "Orla? Christ. Everything okay?"

"Aye I just wanted to check on you."

Chip smiled softly, "I'm grand."

"Are you sure?"

"Aye," she responded quietly, pausing as she began to hear her Mam when the record stopped playing. She sniffled, trying to hide the tears in her voice, "Thank you."

"No problem."

Chip hung up just as Orla started to chew on something, probably her breakfast and most likely a pop tart. A smile crossed her lips as she set the phone back down. She had asked James not to ring all day and promised that the second she needed him, she would call as he enthused. She just wanted to be with her Mammy for the day, with no distractions and no feeling compelled to discuss her feelings when she couldn't really figure them out as it was. She had thought he'd be the only one to remember the significance of the day (well Chelle would but they currently weren't talking) so she hadn't thought to communicate such requests to anyone else. And honesty, she had desperately needed that.

She drove to the cemetery after her Mammy had finally managed to somewhat pull herself together. The second she sat in the car and Chip pulled off, silent tears had cascaded down her Ma's face. Chip pretended not to see them as she checked her mirrors.

Upon arriving at the grave, Chip replaced the flowers on both Cal's and her Da's graves. She cleaned their headstones of debris, fixed the one figurine on her Da's that had been knocked over and wiped her hands on her jeans as she stood back up. Meanwhile, her Ma just stared at the words written on both graves without saying a thing.

"Mammy?" Chip whispered, gently placing her hand onto her Ma's arm. She seemingly snapped out of some sort of trance and looked to her daughter, frowning when she suggested that they should go after almost an hour of being stood in the graveyard.

The day was full of complete silence from both Byrne women, undrunk cups of tea and the continuous blank expression of her Ma. Chip cooked dinner, as per her plan, and that too went untouched by her Ma. Ciara desperately did not want to eat, she wanted to feel the gnawing of hunger within her stomach so she could feel something different to the pain within her mind for just a moment of relief. But she couldn't allow herself the relapse, valuling her progress more than the need to be numb in the mind.

Chip stayed with her Ma until she fell asleep, not wanting to leave her side in case she was needed for something important. Or even just a cup of tea, she would settle for that. As she closed the door to her Ma's bedroom, she for once let her gaze fall onto the door of Cal's. Ever since the day after she had found out about Cal, she hadn't stepped foot in the room once. Only now it didn't seem so daunting. So she took a deep breath, then opened the door - immediately being hit with the smell of Cal and a rather unsettling dust scent. The room itself had been untouched and uncleaned so now it lay heavy with dust, she supposed all sorts of spiders lived in the shadows now. It brought her a great deal of sadness to see the room like that, just neglected because they couldn't handle cleaning it or disturbing the way he had kept it.

Instead of a deep clean to honour her brother, Ciara was instead drawn to her brothers bookshelf. There was one book that was not included in the neat rows of books. It had been pulled out significantly, as if just haphazardly put back as he rushed out the door. The bookmark still poked out of it, holding the page forever. She smiled as she read the title then plucked the book from the shelf, sitting on the floor as she opened the pages. She started at the beginning, of course, and often cried or smiled at the words of the book and his matching annotations. But she stopped where he had and suddenly, they could share another thing. Neither would ever know what happened at the end of that book, the book which made its onto the very top of her bedroom shelves.