Don't Let Go.

chapter two.

Two.

I gently shut the door to Rose's small car, waving at her without meeting her eyes. I was too tired to deal with the worry, and although I could feel myself slipping again, it felt like something I needed to deal with on my own. I had already asked her for so much in the past couple of months.

Because everything seemed different to me now, somehow. The peaceful, curving streets of my hometown in Edgecomb, Maine. The smell of the ocean that rolled off of the bay. The homes around my own that I'd grown to know and love. I couldn't raise my eyes to look at them, or my own tiny house as I walked through our quiet yard. Something had changed about all of it. Something was wrong.

I limped to the back door out of habit, pausing before I pushed through the wooden barrier. Wincing at the loudness of my feet on the tile floor, and still dripping salt water, I jumped as it slammed shut behind me. It didn’t matter, considering I would be the only one to hear it. The noise still sounded wrong though, and it echoed off plain walls, decorated only in pictures of a family that no longer existed.

A lump built up in my throat as I thought about it, and my fingers immediately started to trace the odd scar hugging my rib cage. Through the damp material of my black tee shirt, I could just feel the irregular rise, licking from the bottom of my hip and dissipating into my ribs: a lumpy, uneven crescent that would mar me forever.

I don’t remember the accident that scarred me this way. I don’t remember breathing as my sister lay beside me, her life slowly fading out of the body that was suddenly too broken to hold her.

Though our parents had only suffered from minor bumps and bruises, I was unconscious, from the minute the other car swerved, smashing through the right side and the back half of our small car. My head had hit the window, cracking the glass like a spider’s web.

And my sister was gone.

The thought conjured the smell of wet earth, the sensation of satin on my legs. The sound of my mother's muffled cries as we buried my sister.

“Cassie,” I whispered, the taste of her name on my lips finally letting loose the torrent of tears that had built up behind my eyes, without my noticing.

I stumbled down the hallway, with tired eyes to blur the pictures of my family as I walked past each of their bedrooms. I rocked on the cold, wooden floor of my own room, taking the comforter from my bed and letting myself scream into it.

I don't know how long I cried for her. After her funeral, when my parents were still around, there were countless days like this one. Quieter, because we had tried to hide it, but the pain was the same. It kept us separated, unable to help each other as the three of us struggled through different kinds of grief. 

What was left of my family had ghosted around each other. I noticed that they never really looked straight at me: they were trying to pretend that I didn't look just like her. And I pretended not to hear my mother's sobs at night, or my father hushing her, holding her until she wore herself out on my sister's name. 

Thinking about those nights--my parents-- was the final straw. Suddenly angry, I swiped at the tears still running down my face and forced myself to my feet. I stomped through the quiet house, not exactly sure what I was looking for until I found them. A pair of sharp, dangerous looking scissors that promised the change I needed.

***

About an hour later, I stared at myself hard in the mirror. 

Long, black waves of my hair lay around me. I cut it because I couldn't bear it: looking like her.

My sister had meant everything to me, but it was too much. Too much to look in the mirror and see the ghost of her, and not me. Too much to see the pain I caused in the people around me. They were the people who had loved her, and all I did was hurt them, staring at them with her face.

My pitch black hair now hung just at my collar bones. It was layered, with long, choppy bangs that hung down over moss green eyes. My oval face was bone pale, and one that belonged to a stranger. I didn't look like me. But I didn't look like her, either. 

Although Cassie and I were twins, it was always clear that there was something more to her. Something special. She was innovative, funny and confident. Kind, more than anything else. She had this way of making whoever she was talking to feel important. 

I was a good person, before she died, but I was never as good as she was. And I never got to tell her how much I looked up to her, or how much I needed her. 

I didn't think I would ever understand why it was me who lived.