The Violet Hour

Chapter 2 - Going Under

I rushed home from school with my head in a fog. I shouldn’t have opened up my mind like that in Geometry. I had suppressed all those memories for a reason. I knew letting them out was trouble, but I did it anyways.

            I unlocked the door and slipped inside. Gale’s car hadn’t been in the driveway. She was probably out doing something work related. I didn’t mind. If she was here she would have wanted to know how my first day went, ask about the cute guys, and I would have had to fake interest in order to not hurt her feelings. She probably wouldn’t have noticed that I had cried the whole way home. Maybe she couldn’t even tell the difference anymore. Maybe salt-stained was the only way anybody recognized my face. I certainly cried enough for every 16 year old out there combined.

            I took the stairs two at a time, with fresh tears welling up. I hurried into my room and slammed the door behind me. I threw my bag against the wall and collapsed onto the floor, just like the first night I came to live with Gale. All the lawyers and officials and officers, they all thought it would be best for me to stay with a blood relative, instead of putting me in foster care at such a late age. Besides, Gale had remained close to our family through the years. No doubt she was worried about her baby sister. She would let us come and stay with her some summers. She even designed a room especially for me for the summers, the green one that I had succeeded in tearing apart.

Gale was my mother’s sister. They had the same long straight black hair and delicate features. Mother was very petit, Gale was slightly larger. They both had creamy porcelain skin and liquid brown eyes. Sometimes I found it hard to look at Gale without picturing my mother, thus making it difficult to forget about her sometimes.

I had loved my mom dearly, and I knew she was just as fragile a person as I was. She had suffered from clinical depression all her life and she never took change well. There were times when she would spend weeks at a time locked in her bedroom without speaking to me or my father.

When she got in her moods Dad would always say, “Mommy’s just recharging sweetheart. She’ll be just fine.” When I would ask about why it always took Mommy longer than everyone else to recharge he would just get out Josiah and make me forget about everything in the world. I could never understand the concept of her being sick until I was older. When you’re nine sick means lying in a bed filled with tissues and getting to stay home from school, but my mother was mentally sick.

When I got to the age where I could talk to her about it she would just describe it as “riding a low.” She said that she would wake up some mornings, and just see no reason to get out of bed. So she would tell my dad to take care of me for a bit while she tried to get herself together. Of course he agreed, he loved my mother dearly and wanted to see her better. I think that both of us had that little hope that if we left her alone, she would figure it out for herself and one day get better. We were wrong.

When the news came of my father’s death I knew it would hit her hard. There was now an excuse for her to be on her low all the time. She no longer needed to try to get out of bed. I was old enough to take care of myself, plus I was dealing with my own turmoil anyway, and she knew that. So we stayed separated for the most part.

I was always afraid that I was going to end up like my mom, see no reason for living and just completely give up on myself. Maybe that’s why I had been stuck in the place I was for so long.

I didn’t want to think about any of it. I walked over to my stereo and violently slapped the play button, hoping I could escape with whatever music it was going to spit out at me. “Going Under” by Evanescence blasted through…fitting.

“Screaming, deceiving and bleeding for you.

But you still won’t hear me…”