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THREE. I SPEND MY LIFE WATCHING IT FROM THE SIDELINES
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Hannah spends her whole life watching it go by from the sidelines. At her home, she stares out her bedroom window, watching bugs land on the glass like they're trying to come in as she wishes to escape. She smokes cigarettes until her lungs burn and watches it swirl around her freely, a feeling she always wishes to endure. But Hannah will never be free. She'll never know what it's like to properly live, to go through life not feeling guilty for what happened in that room.
The events that happened over those two months came and disappeared in blurs. She remembered them mostly when she slept, something she rarely ever did anymore. It was hard to sleep when there was constantly pain in her ears, in your head, in your eyes, in your mouth, in your whole body. Hannah lived in pain, physically and emotionally. What she would give to be able to drown her sorrows in music, the loudest she could play to drown out the noise around her, to block out the thoughts in her head and the voices that whisper her name when she walks the hallways of her school. But she can't because Hannah can't hear anything.
The doctors told her that her ear drums had been ruptured from the trauma of them being stitched. Hannah remembers her mother crying and she remembers being confused because she couldn't hear anything. It was completely silent. She couldn't hear herself when she tried to talk. All she saw was her crying parents and a commiserate doctor. She was in so much pain.
The decision to go back to school was a hard one for both Hannah and her mother. For two weeks, Hannah couldn't get out of bed. She didn't eat, she didn't speak, she was swallowed in silence, forced to only breathe in the poison. She tried to act tough. She tried acting like she was okay, but in the end, Hannah felt like a monster. The guilt eats her alive until her skin feels like it's deteriorating. She can't wash it off. Hannah can still see it all when she closes her eyes, all of them trapped in that room. Kayla crying hysterical and Daphne whimpering like a baby deer, and Lacy trying to be tough for them but she was shaking so much it caused her to throw up. She can still feel the pain of him taking everything from her, from them. He took her voice, he took her hearing, he took her sanity.
