Love and the Sea and Everything in Between

chapter forty-five

Ten days.

Two-hundred-and-forty hours.

Countless seconds have passed since my waking. I've heard stories before of people who were subconsciously aware while comatose – others where they went to heaven or hell and met God or family members or friends and stuff like that.

That's not the case for me.

I never expected to wake up. I never expected to see Liz's face again. I never expected any of this. I thought I would die and it would be over. The last thing I remember was the blood and the sting of the wounds on my wrist and the sadness without the tears. But now I'm here, alive, and everything is like it was before, but different... in a way.

My parents won't leave me alone for any long periods of time. I'm in the mental ward, now. And I'm on suicide watch. I feel the nurses' eyes burning into the back of my neck when I'm not looking. Under their constant watch, I'm suffocating.

Liz is gone right now and my parents are too. So I'm alone for now. Well, alone with the nurses.

I stare down at the bandages wrapped tight around my wrist. I want them gone. I want to see. I need to see the damage I did. I need to see the wound to make it real because right now I'm floating. I feel distant and numb to everything and everyone around me.

When Liz visits me, I never know what to say so mostly we sit with each other in silence. She still wears her baggy hoodie, which makes it worse because she used to be the most colorful person I'd ever known.

And I've destroyed her.

I hate myself.

I hate myself for trying to kill myself and not succeeding because now I have to look my parents in the eye and when I do I can see that they know things now that I never wanted them to know. It hurts to know that you've caused someone else pain. At least, it should. The sad truth seems to be that not everyone cares if they hurt other people. Or, maybe, they're just too stupid to realize the damage they've done. (Case in point: Jeremiah.)

I pull my journal from the nightstand and open it up to where Liz first started writing. I trace the delicate scrawl of her penmanship, a stark contrast to my heavy-handed scribblings. There is such sorrow in her words, such longing, but none of it seems to answer the one question I have: why does she even care?

I can't ignore the way my hurricane life has affected her. I brought her into this messed up world of mine. I'm the reason for her sadness and tears. I'm the reason she's missed too many classes to allow her to pass this semester. I'm the reason she can't move on. Because I couldn't manage one simple task: to kill myself.

Wouldn't it just be easier to die? The people I love could finally move on and I could too. I could finally stop this, the pain of remembering.

Liz's words tell me how she loves me and how she cares, but they don't explain why. They don't explain why she spent countless days by my bedside after avoiding me for two months. I want to ask her, but talking to her now is a foreign thing because now I'm vulnerable – too vulnerable – for my liking. I've spent so long carefully constructing my secrets around me like a castle wall. Every shadow place, every faded corner strategically placed became my defense. Every guarded weakness became my strength. What am I supposed to do now that the secrets have gone and the shadows have vanished?

My jaw tenses and my teeth grind against each other when the nurse walks up to me and hands me a little paper cup with multiple pills inside.

"What are those?" I ask.

"Medicine," she says. Her face is straight, unmoved, stern. Her eyes are alert and seem to say that if I don't take the pills she'll force them down my throat. She's not a big woman, but she sure is menacing.

I lift the cup to my lips and tip my head back, letting the pills fall down my throat. It's uncomfortable and she doesn't give me any water so I do my best to swallow.

"Open," she says. I obey and she checks to make sure, I assume, that I've not hidden any of the pills under my tongue. "Good," she says when she's done, taking the paper cup from my hands. Then she hands me a folded up page. "I found this under the bed in your old room. Somebody must've left it for you." With that, she walks away and I am left alone to the thoughts in my head, the medicine in my system, and the page between my fingers.

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