A Letter to the Ones I've Loved (Bully Luke Hemmings)

Entry 1

As I lay in my bed all my mind can think about is time. I could never quite comprehend how time was different on each planet. A year is a year. How was a year here equal to two on Mars? Or how come relationships can't work out because of timing. Timing is a funny thing, you know, because everyone thinks they have all the time in the world. Until they don't anymore.

I guess I've lived a good life. But I'm not ready for it to end. If I died today, I'd want my last words to be something to spite Luke Hemmings. I've said enough to everyone except for him. Luke, correction, the biggest jerk I know, if you're reading this, I hope you get herpes. On your penis. No offense, you just deserve it.

The doctors say I've been dying slowly since I was three. Which is sorta funny, 'cause we are all pretty much slowly dying. My slow death was supposed to come to a close when I was 13. Joke's on death, because I'm 16 now and still living like a champ. I sorta have to keep my humor about it because when I really think about it, the fact that I've lived 3 extra years and could literally die any minute, I could shit myself.

No one knows what it's like to be dying. Well, not many people at least. Truth is, it's a lot like living. Except I'm living in limbo. Constantly waiting for what I know is unavoidable. I think everyone is scared of death at some point in their lives. But isn't it interesting that the people that most fear death are kids and the elderly? I guess as a kid death is scary because you have so much to look forward to. And as we reach the last few chapters in our lives I'd assume it's hard to prepare yourself to lose all of your favorite memories. I wouldn't say I'm scared of dying. More of the latter, living. Because when you know that your death is near there's this pressure to build up as many beautiful memories as you can. Living with death always in the back of your mind is like eating the best sandwich of your life and then realizing that it'll be gone soon. That said, getting another sandwich, or more time, is never as good as what you had before. I guess there's a beauty in that. I've never had the comfort of knowing that I would always have happy moments because each happy moment could be my last happy moment. It doesn't always get better because I could die when I'm at my worst in terms of my mental health.

It's hard to know that my time, a concept I hardly understand, is limited more and more each day. When I was three I was rushed into the hospital. My dad had died 3 days earlier from a heart attack. I was experiencing shortness of breath and running a fever. At first, the doctors assumed it was my body dealing with the shock of my dad's death. Still, the doctors ran a bunch of scans on me. Although nothing specific showed up, the doctors realized something wrong with the way my body functioned. My disease, although not diagnosed, was said to have taken such a toll on my body each day, that I would die by the time I was 13. Yet, as I've said, I'm 16 years old and going strong.

I am greeted by my mothers distressed face as I walk down the stairs. She seems to always look stressed out and I assume it's just become her normal expression. Some people's natural expression looks as if they could kill a man with their bare hands, my mom, however, has this expression so full of worry that she could make a burglar stop robbing a bank just to make sure she's ok. My mom, Trish, is short and somewhat thin with bright blue eyes like mine and my sisters. I don't eat much. It's not that I hate food but the combination of all my medications has basically ruined my appetite. I've become very frail looking which I don't like. I'd much rather look healthy so people didn't assume I was sick just by looking at me. So most days, including yesterday, I swallow my pills and then leave. A pink pill for my anxiety, one blue pill for my OCD and another purple pill for something I wasn't even sure of but probably just something to keep me from dying and then I say goodbye to my ballet prodigy sister, Elizabeth and I'm off to face another treacherous day.  

I ride the bus to school and it's the worst part of my day. I'd like to be one of those sick people who wants to carry on their normal life as it would be if they weren't sick but those people never rode my bus. I'd do anything to just be at home alone and not at the bus stop. Which everyone thinks is a side effect of my depression. But actually, I'm fine with being alone most of the time. But because my mom thinks my last memories shouldn't be of me in my room, I still go to school. This way, my last memories can be of me being bullied. At one point, my doctor thought he had reached a break through in diagnosing me. He said I had a very rare form of cancer. Because of this, I went through extreme treatments of chemotherapy. I lost all of my hair only to later find out that the treatment was not helping at all. My hair has now grown back to just about shoulder length. I go to school everyday and not only do I have to deal with the fact that I'm dying, but I also have to face these jerks who pick on me everyday. If physical activity didn't make me faint, I would beat them up. Probably.