The Burning Girl

Chapter 2 - A N N A

Listen to 'The Night We Met' by Lord Hyron - sorry if it makes anyone cry it's the song from 13 reasons why, but I thought it suited the mood.

FIVE MONTHS EARLIER

Sometimes I wish you could press pause in life. Just stop for one moment before life hits you again. The constant battle against the waves and waves of pain and nightmares. Somehow you find the strength to keep going, even if you've felt like giving up, which I have, more than once.

Loneliness is the real killer though, if you have no one for so long, how can you keep on going. How do I keep on going? Surviving?

The only thing keeping me going these days is my desire to break out of the mould that I have driven myself into. The perfect child, trying to makeup for all the things my mother has lost in her life. Trying to lie to myself that I've gotten better, denying the crushing anxiety that keeps rising in my throat. The constant turmoil trying to remember what's real and what I made up.

Whether or not James was real.

My James. The better half of me and the only person that could have saved us from drowning in sorrow, saved us from what was to come.

He was in the special forces in Afghanistan, working in the intelligence core, when we were told that he died on a mission in the field. My father was broken, my mother inconsolable, and I was heartbroken. The shouting matches kept me awake at night cutting me to the core, the violence ensued from my father, the typical hothead Irish genes fueling his rash anger. Not once did they notice how I was dying inside. They never noticed how unhappy I was or how thin I was becoming. Over the years, I went through hell and back with no support from my parents. They were too wrapped up in their misery to notice my suffering. James was the better part of me, he was my big brother and I was lost without him.

James was the glue that held this family together, and once he was torn away we all fell apart.

My father grew more and more distant, eventually filing for a divorce from my mother. That broke her heart even more, and I hated him for it. I still do. Just because he was my family and I loved him, didn't mean I had to like him.

Queue the tiny violin. That's the only thing I'm missing right now.

By the time I was eleven I became my very own version of a suitcase kid, travelling back and forth between my parents for four years. My father became mean and wouldn't treat me with kindness anymore. I reminded him too much of James, his golden boy. I was never good enough for him, and he never forgot to tell me. It got to the stage that when he drank he became abusive and violent; I went to school with purple bruises on my skin which he told me to lie about. It got to the point where Ma took him to court so that he wasn't allowed to see me anymore. Years went by without me seeing him for more than a week, and he got worse and worse. His blonde hair was turning grey, he was drinking more and more and it got to the point where I couldn't understand him because of his slurring mixed with the Kerry accent.

He told me stay away. He felt ashamed and didn't think he deserved to see his daughter any more.

He died last year.

A heart attack.

According to the hospital, he had felt a pain in his chest and had phoned, but died whilst speaking on the phone. He died without me ever telling him that I loved him, even after all he did to me. He died not knowing that my mother still loved him, after all he did to her. He was the love of her life and she regretted the divorce every day that she lived through it. She only did it to protect me from getting hurt. Like I wasn't already, though.

When we were told, it was possibly one of the hardest things I have had to hear in my life. My mother received the phone call in our kitchen and I was patiently waiting to hear the conversation. She put the phone on speaker phone. The nurse spoke to us very quietly that I almost didn't notice when she mentioned that Da had died. I was shocked, to say the least. My fifteen-year-old self not quite comprehending what was being said. But the look on my mother's face told me that it was true.

"He's gone, he's really gone," I remember her whispering. Her face was shiny with the cold, smooth tears running down her face. I wrapped my arms around her and climbed into her lap. We sat there for what felt like hours, hugging each other and not letting go.