Almond Boy

Almond Boy - 16

"Mama?" Emma asks from her bedroom, her voice breaking, and she finds herself stuttering in breaths quite a lot.

She hopes her mom can hear her. She can already hear her mom coming in, like when she was sick as a kid, and saying "You only call me mama when you're real sick, baby," and Emma will reply "you only call me baby when you're worried about me, mama."

But her mom doesn't come in, and Emma closes her eyes thinking through the conversations like they usually have when she's not feeling too good. 

Emma feels like an elephant is on her chest and the world is on her shoulders. She's trying to do her schoolwork at her desk, and all the lights are off, only the sunlight from outside glowing in her room. 

She prefers it that way, the Florida sun making everything glow a golden color in her room. Her pale blue room looks like it's being seen with golden sunglasses, and it makes her smile. Usually.

The elephant must be pregnant on her chest, and her stomach feels like it's whirling even though she hasn't eaten in hours, and her side is cramping. 

"Mama?" she asks again, and she finds her head feeling heavier and heavier, her eyelids drooping before she forces them open again. Her Chemistry homework, something she usually does with ease, is getting harder. She can't even focus. 

"I get what you mean," she thinks from Elliot's text from yesterday. Does he get this feeling? Does he understand it?

She doesn't know how she feels about him getting it. Why does he get everything? How does he get everything? Does he understand having an oxygen tank whirs feel like it's screaming in your ears "I'm saving your life, you should be happy with any noise I make, so I'm going to be as loud as possible!" Does he understand how it feels when your lungs feel deflated and your head is pounding? Does he get fed up with being sick?

He's a boy that seems like he has all the answers, that he gets every little thing about being sick, that there's no worth in getting fed up anymore because that's life. How can he not get fed up? How does he not just look in the mirror and want to scream, because he's just so sick of being sick. 

Elliot is not the problem, stop thinking, stop blaming, stop thinking, stop wondering, stop thinking, stop dreaming, stop thinking, stop fading, stop thinking. Just stop, Emma thinks. Her head is dropping more and more, her hair coating her paper in strawberry blonde strands, and she lifts her hands to keep her head up on a pedestal. 

"Mama?" she asks again. Her body feels like it's shaking. Her arms feel like they're wobbling. She thinks of the history paper she did yesterday, the one on Rome, and how her arms are like the columns and they're collapsing. 

Her head is not Rome though. It was never a glorious city that glistened in the light with soldiers dying for the pride of it. Her mind was just a stupid teenager's mind, and a stupid child's mind, and a stupid baby's mind. Her mind was nothing special. 

It still isn't. I'm just another sick kid, like Elliot, like the kids who are shown on the commercials for "Make a Wish" foundation, like the kids in storybooks that I used to like to read and pretend I understood, I am them. I'm not different. 

"Mama!?" she yells out. Her voice can't even manage one word without cracking like crazy, and her lungs feel like they're dry and breaking and deflated.

Tears are coming down her cheeks and falling on her chemistry paper, ruining it with little unclean wrinkles from the water. She can't move, her arms are shaking, and her world is shaking, and her machine keeps fucking clicking, and her breathing is ragged, and she can feel her heart racing.