A Life Foretold

Chapter 14: Through the Life That We Share

5,326 words.

My Father was abused.

His mother was, too.

And her mother before that.

Each of them struggled with drugs and alcohol.

Neither of them wanted kids.

Neither of them wanted to be alive.

I understood that. Afterall, death is as beautiful as love. Being alive is painful whereas death is the most peaceful thing on the planet. When you can't escape, death is there for you, and it is the universal, guaranteed way to escape. I rested assured that dying alone would be the happiest thing to ever happen to me in my life, in my future. It meant I was there to hold the hands of everyone I cared about and watch as their eyes closed forever and their pain subsided for eternity.

It was my duty: To be alone.

It was my duty to love everyone I cared about enough to stay in this world, even if it meant being alone in it.

My duty was to watch their limbs untense and say goodbye as a nice, soft blanket covered their fading skin and to remember the feeling of their fingers that interlaced mine that ran cold knowing they were loved until the very end. It was my duty that I helped to assure everyone else's dreams came true and died knowing they were loved. I mean, love is so beautiful. Love is so happy. Perhaps I wasn't loved like that, even though I craved it more than trees craved rain during a dreadful summer drought, but I could still give it to others... right? And you can't find life beautiful if you don't find death beautiful.

But I knew I was alone in that belief.

Dying alone meant my duty was done, and I could finally escape– not just life but the constricted feelings and obligations that followed. Only then would I find happiness.

Though my duty was being alone, being alone is lonely.

So very lonely.

I wouldn't fear raw loneliness until much later. I didn't yet understand what loneliness was. Afterall, how could I have known? I wasn't ever truly alone until then. Though, I'm alone in that, too. Not many people know about pure loneliness, but that was a part of my duty, too.

I hoped my love was good enough to keep others in this world.

But it never was.

Maybe that's why my great-grandmother, my grandmother, and my father never wanted kids. They knew their love wasn't good enough– that they had yet to learn how to love. Perhaps they're actually selfless, and they hoped from the bottom of their hearts that they would learn to love along the way.

They didn't want kids, but they had them anyway.

They each had two– maybe because they knew what being lonely was like and wanted to have one person who understood their hardships, one person who understood them.

However, that was sadly never the case.

I didn't know how little I understood Alluka– how little I understood everyone.

Grandmother was abused.

Her responsibility was to take care of her younger brother instead of herself. Her responsibility was to hide the truth and ignore the harsh realities from her brother along with herself.

Her mother was broken. Her mother broke her, too.

Her mother didn't know how to love, and she feared that– therefore she feared her daughter's existence. She feared being a parent because the only parents she knew were her own, and they were painful. She feared being that parent. Yet she was.