Pluviophile

2| Messed-up / Ash P.O.V

               

I decided that today would be a good day. The sun peeped out of the clouds that had directed last nights' storm, and the birds twitted about the beginning of the cleansed world. My morning waffles had a brighter taste, as if the rain had washed away the usual blandness that came with my meds. The usual people hovered at the edge of my vision: my sister, her red hair tied back in a ponytail, Mrs. Phillips, my English teacher who first put forward the idea that I was schizophrenic, and Ember, with her cinnamon curls shielding her eyes. I hadn't seen any of them in years. My sister drowned herself when I was sixteen; I was diagnosed with schizophrenia later that year. When her funeral came, I just sat there, unfeeling, unseeing. My parents thought it was weird that I could hear my sisters' voice echoing back everything I said. I was paranoid that someone was stalking me, and began to distance myself from everyone. I would run, run fast and hard, into a place I had no connection with, and sit up a tree or someplace obscure until the police eventually came for me and brought me home. Then the cycle would repeat itself. All of this I could deal with. But when they appeared, a collection of mismatched characters of importance to me, I lost it. I was hospitalised two weeks after my seventeenth birthday. Happy birthday, Ash.

I haven't seen Ember in so long. Before I was hospitalized, I went with her to get her diagnosis. Depression, the doctor had said. Depression and anxiety. We had already known about the anxiety. The depression wasn't much a surprise either. We had all known about her prolonged sadness, but we had all put that down to the fairly recent breakup with the boy she had been besotted with, and the death of her childhood dog. Also, the past couple of years hadn't been kind to her.

My sister was diagnosed with depression when she was fifteen, just like Ember. But unlike Ember, her determination to not succumb to it wasn't as strong, and drowned herself when she was seventeen. It tore my family in half. My mainly absent father became abusive, angry with my mother for not getting her to a therapist while he was working out of town. My mother was angry at my father, for hitting her, at herself, for letting Saph go to the beach that day, and at me, for causing her to leave the house in tears the day she died. But mostly she was sad. I was angry. Angry at Sapphire, for causing this. Angry with my parents, for doing what they were doing. Angry at myself, for saying those unforgivable things. My schizophrenic diagnosis destroyed what little family unit remained, and my parents divorced. Saying that my family was messed up wouldn't cover it.