UNSEEN

ELEVEN

It's late at night, we've just come home. I'm supposed to take the dress off, but it smells like Liv. I wouldn't give it up for the world. I look at myself in the mirror and see all the things I don't want to see. When in hell did I start to look like this?

I never had a very noticeable face. It was pretty enough but always missing life. Now, it's all gone. I look no different than the dying man at the hospital. My brown hair is rough and frizzy, there are bags under my huge, round eyes, there's my long, narrow nose, thin lips, a dimple on the right cheek and a long neck. I'm white as a sheet and have wonky knees. Wearing Liv's dress isn't going to make me look like her.

She was tall, slender, with a beautiful tan and smooth blonde locks. She was the pretty sibling. She was the smart one, too. We both had above average intelligence, but she actually used it. I was mentioned with adjectives like 'the younger one' or 'the creative child' or 'the one who plays the violin.'

I don't even play the violin anymore.

It's different now. Now, my name is my adjective. Reece.

Synonym for: Audacious, unbalanced, volatile, uncurbed, berserk and miserable.

I pull out Liv's journal and decide to read everything tonight. As I look at the words she wrote, my head starts to hurt. The drumbeat. The drumbeat never stops.

10th July, 2012

It's their second anniversary and they only started talking to each other a week ago. Funny, how they care so much about what people think about their marriage and not one bit about how morally wrong it is to cheat or to stay with someone who's cheating. But then, who am I to talk about cheating? And Evan probably isn't even cheating.

Nah. He is.

I'm supposed to be getting dressed for the party. Reece refused to be part of it, and now I'm the host. I don't blame her for pulling out, though. People don't understand Reece. I do.

She doesn't hate the world, she just doesn't know how to comprehend whatever the fuck is going on in it. Come to think of it, we're all just like her, just better at hiding.

When we were kids, our mother lectured us about dealing with hardships with a smile. Reece never listened. I, however, liked the thought of always smiling, until I realised what it really meant. We smile so that the world doesn't get to know about our problems because it doesn't want to deal with them. We smile for them, not for us.

When I go down, the room is going to be full of perfectly happy couples. And that's dumb, because if everyone is happy, how come no one is?

It doesn't matter. I've been assigned to deal with the bullshit. I'm going to do what I do best. I'm going to smile.

13th August, 2012

Evan has a black eye. It's not something we see every day. He came home from work with it. I never quite understood what it is that he does- something to do with taxes- but his work life hasn't been all plain sailing lately.

He didn't fully tell mom what happened, which led to another argument downstairs. For the first time in over a year, Reece came to my room.

"What do you think you did?" She asked me. Few things amuse her like this.

"I don't know." I said. "Maybe he got robbed."

"But why wouldn't he tell mom?"

I didn't have an answer. I never really formed an opinion about Evan, neither did Reece. He couldn't be worse than our father. 'Father.' We grew up hating that word. Evan is the closest thing we have to it. We try not to hate him, or to love him. He makes mom happy, I've seen it. The way Andrew makes me. He makes her face brighter, and despite the fact that their marriage is failing, I've never met a man that's made her this happy.

"Sara?" my guess.

Reece laughs. "She seems like someone who would claw."

We talk for a couple of more minutes when she realises she should go to her room and do nothing. Just when the walls between us start to come down, she remembers some work, even though she doesn't have any. She'll probably write, or stare out the window, or draw really freaky stuff.

But maybe we're better off not clinging to each other. Makes us seem less vulnerable. Makes us seem stronger than we really are.

24th August, 2012

Some days, I feel like a fire put out. Helpless, toned down and numb, suddenly feeling the cold apathy after long days of fiery ardour. What must we do to find happiness? I'm failing miserably.

He's changed. He is not the person I left Calum for. He is not the same.

I have a problem. In order to find relief from everything that's wrong in my life, I tend to get attached to people who are not responsible for it, so much so, I lose track of who I am. And then, upon realising I don't mean to them as much as they mean to me, all I feel is colossal pain, from which I don't recover until I attach myself to someone else.

Now that I know I can't stay attached to him for too long, I feel my windpipe swelling. He is all I have. I don't know how to tell him he's changed without offending him. The last thing I want to do is to offend him.

So, I decided to go away for the weekend with Hailey. We'll leave tomorrow and stay at her dad's cabin with a couple of our friends.

Maybe I'll never come back. But I will. I know I will. I'm stuck in his dementing enticement.

There's a bug on the window. Behind it, I can make out a ray of light peering through the clouds. I re-read the part where she said she understood me, and the ocean starts to build up again. But the tears still don't come out.

Sometimes, I wonder if I'm even real. I wonder if existence is real. Sometimes, I feel like a fragment of someone else's imagination. Worse, my own imagination. Sometimes, I feel like I'm parallel to reality, like I'm non-existent, like all of this is just a dream.

But certain things pull me back. Like the bug that was on the window is stinging me now. I dust it away like the killer put away Liv. It's now that I realise that it's all real. It always has been. And even if it's not, even if it's all just a dark dream, this dark dream is all I have.

It is five o'clock. The sun is up now and it won't be long before my mother calls Doctor Tressman.

I put on a shirt and a pair of shorts and run down in my flip flops. I begin to walk down to Hailey's street. I'm going to take my only shot.