To Keep You

Two: Olive

It's estimated that every eleven seconds, a human dies, and a human is born. The families either have time to mourn the loss of life once loved or rejoice in the beginning of a new life. They have time to process their feelings and allow them to settle in. Rather, they are sorrowful or joyful. As envious as a teenage to a model, I deeply envied those people for they had time, and I did not.

Like a statue made from ice, I was frozen in shock, for my other emotions were locked away deep within me. It was only three days ago when I felt as if my life was truly starting to begin, but like a wave crashing down, it came to a stop. It's been three days since I took my last breath, three days since my world stopped, and three days since I became a prisoner to this hospital room.

Three days since I witnessed both death and life in the same breath...

"Hello? Ma'am are you even listening to me?" The female deputy sighed loudly as she tapped her pen against the small notebook that resided in the palm of her hand. She was growing irritated with me, for she has been here for over an hour and has done most of the talking. Rather, as I have resumed the role of a statue, just simply breathing and blinking is a chore of it's own.

Both I wish I could neglect and abandon...

I didn't know what to say to her. Truthfully, for the last seventy-two hours, I haven't uttered a word or shed a tear. If it wasn't for the medicine the nurses were injecting into my IV, I wouldn't have slept either. It seems all I have done for the last three days is stare at the blank white walls and lay in the thin uncomfortable bed, while wondering why it felt as if God was cursing me when I felt that my prayers were finally being answered.

"Yes." My voice was strained from screaming in my sleep, or at least that's what the nurses tell me. But I was on the fence about them, I didn't miss the pity smiles and stares they offered me whenever they were forced to come check in on me. I didn't miss the hushed whispers they shared between one another as they huddled outside my door in the late hours of the night when they thought I was asleep, they were mistaken for I was always very much awake and unknown to them, I had to endure their curious stares while they got to gawk at the woman who lost her baby.

Yes, come in, and see the circus freak of the year!

More honest than a priest, I don't remember much of that night. One moment I was on the beach accepting Seth marriage proposal and the next I was in the back of an ambulance being rushed to the nearest hospital, they told me I was hemorrhaging, and my babies were losing oxygen. After that, everything just blurs together like this is just multiple nightmares combined together to make my life a real-life horror story, one that puts every true-crime podcast to shame.

"Ma'am, I know this is hard for you to talk about, but the sooner you talk, the fresher the details will be." The deputy didn't care about me. You could hear it in her voice. It was there laced behind her sickly-sweet voice. I wanted to tell her to leave me alone for my pain was mine to bare and hoard, however I knew she was just trying to do her job. She's here to get me to confuse to what I saw, but even I didn't know what I saw.

This is a waste of time.

Taking my silence as an act of defiance, she sighed even louder, and I wondered if she sighed again, would the very walls of this dull room crumble?

"Ma'am, I have a teenager on life support, a man in a medical induced coma, a kidnapped woman, a string of unsolved burglaries in Holyoke, and now the death of a baby on my hands."

She pinched the bridge of her nose as if she was the one who lost the child and not me. I narrowed my eyes, for all I felt in this moment was hatred for the woman. She had no clue to just what kind of hell I'm in. I've had to endure both death and life by myself for the last three days without anyone holding my hand and supporting me! She seems to have forgotten that's my friend who is on life support, that's my fiancé who's in a coma, that's my future sister-in-law who was kidnapped, that was my cabin in which was victimized and trashed as if that home had no value, no memories, no soul. And that was my son who died, I didn't even get to hold him, love him, before he was ripped away from me and delivered back into the arms of God.