Every Second Counts

It is hard to know you're going to die. There is absolutely nothing that compares to it. I spent ages wondering, racking my brain, trying to figure out what it would be like. Would it hurt? Would I actually see my life flash before my eyes like they say happens? What happens after death? Is there a heaven, or ghosts or... nothing? Is death the end of everything?

When I was younger my father gave me a diary. It was brown leather and had the most beautiful red ribbon to tie it closed. Father said to write everything; all my thoughts and secrets, to fill the crisp pages with life. I wanted to. I opened it hundreds of times and ran my fingers over the pristine pages, down their golden edges and the smooth leather of the binding. I would pick up a pen and poise it above the paper, ready to engrave upon it my life. I never did though. The pages seemed too perfect, like even the smallest, faintest smudge of ink would ruin it altogether. But what is a book without words? What is a story with no tales to tell?

When I was taken into hospital I realised that when I was gone I would be forgotten. People wouldn't hold my diary and inhale the smell of father or all the memories encased within the pages like I did. They would see emptiness. Absolutely nothing. So I began to write and I will tell everything. Some things ashamed me, I would never speak them out loud, but when I am gone how can people judge me? I won't be there to take insult or have to answer their questions. I suppose in a way they have the right to know. Maybe they would honour my sister. Maybe her soul would be saved, or maybe, if there is a god then he would have seen inside her and known that she was innocent from the start. I hope he did.

My family was happy, Mother, Father, Mary-Anne and I. Too perfect. A fragment of a broken glass, we were on a single unbroken shard but when we reached the crack it would be sharp and never ending, constant obstacles trying to ruin us and tear us apart. It was lethal.

I always remember one day at the lake, we were having a picnic. Mother was sat under the shade of a large oak in a summer dress and hat. She was reading a book, every so often she would smile faintly at the words written within its covers and it would make her face light up. Her ebony curls would sway gently, in the slight mid summer breeze, floating around her. She was beautiful. Father, Mary-Anne and I were playing catch with our old cricket ball. Everyone was smiling. Everyone was happy.

Every once in a while mother would glance up from her book and shoot us a warm but disapproving glance as she noticed the mud smeared on our faces and dresses and how we would throw ourselves through the air to catch the oncoming ball. Then she would smile, shake her head and become once again lost in her book. Eventually, we tired and fell to the floor laughing. Mother noticed and began to lay out the picnic on a checked rug that she had pulled from the baskets depths. Then we,all crowded round and ate homemade rolls and jam and talked and laughed. That was a good day, before everything changed.

When I was seven, father became ill. Mother said it was a type of cancer but she didn't explain any further. She would sit by his bedside and hold his hand, staring into space. She stopped eating and reading and she wouldn't talk to Mary-Anne and I like she used to. She wouldn't touch us, I noticed. She seemed to avoid making physical contact with anyone apart from Father, I never really understood that. She grew paler and paler and thinner and thinner. We worried that mother would make herself fall ill like father so my sister and I tried to assure that she ate and drank and left Father's bedside to exercise. I sometimes wondered whether if had we just left her there beside Father, she would have just never moved and died there beside him.

She still wouldn't leave him even when the day came that his illness took him from us. I don't know how long she had been sat with him there like that, but in the morning Mary-Anne and I went to take them breakfast and father was lay in bed as normal but something was strange. His lips and skin had a slight blue or purple tinge to them. I didn't know what to make of it, assuming it was just another development in whatever was wrong with him originally.