Why She Jumped

November 23rd, 2017

I opened your letter today. I apologize for the salty tears that smudged your ink. I thank you, for the time that you gave to me, all those years ago. I've caught up to you in the past seven years, and soon I will overtake you. But you will always be the big sister I never had.

Your writing was unusually messy, as if you were struggling to form the words. Trembling as you wrote. I think you too must have been crying. You told me about the first time we had met. You had been planning to jump that day I met you. You were tired, alone, and hurt. But when you saw me, a little chubby kid with the oversized glasses, you backed out. That was not something you wanted to embed in my mind. Yet your death is engraved deeper into me than any of the scars you ever gave yourself. I thought you must have been an angel, while you knew that I was yours, protecting you from yourself.

You told me it was okay to be angry. I assure you, Amelia, I was anything but. I no longer sleep, instead reflecting on every chance I had to help. Tears flood my eyes at the mere mention of your name. I cannot hold my girlfriends hand for the fear that it will remind me of you is too great. I refuse to hug my parents because I know it will only result in another breakdown. I look away whenever someone smiles at me because I am scared it will make me forget yours. I am broken, I am hurt, I am confused, and I am miserable. But no, my dear Amelia, I am not mad.

Each year I visit your grave, greeted by your mother and father, their wrinkled faces giving me a weak smile. A lily in each of our hands; it was your favorite flower. Natalie stands a further back as if scared that she'll break entirely if she were to approach the stone above your grave. The past two years a small girl has accompanied her. Her name is Amelia, named after the mother she never got to meet. I should have known the reasoning behind Natalie's excitement at the prospect of IVF, but only now when my eyes meet hers, sparkling blue almost identical to your own, do I realize the dream made possible in your absence.

I realize today, reading that letter; you were my first love. Not in a way that you'd expect, but you were my first real friend. My love for you was innocent, but real none the less. You were the first person to open your heart to me, even if back then I could not recognize it. You were the first to listen to me, absorbing my ideas and beliefs as if your mind was a sponge, no matter how ridiculous. You were the first person I ever loved. You were the first to steal my heart and the first to break it.

When I first met you, I thought you must have been an angel. I know now that you were. You did not leave this earth, you simply returned home, for you were only visiting us here. You were a glimpse of the happiness that was yet to come. Though I wish you hadn't left us to find it alone.

Amelia? I've decided what kind of doctor I want to become. I want to become a psychologist. Perhaps one day I can help someone like you. Perhaps I can spare their friends the pain that you gave to us all, your parting gift to the world. Perhaps I can keep their mother's and father's from crying alone in their children's beds at night, like yours do, hugging the belongings you left behind. And if I am too late, if I am not enough, then perhaps I can sow their victim's hearts back together, like the cardiac surgeon who tried so desperately to keep your heart beating on more day. Perhaps one day I can heal my own.

And perhaps, one day I can see you again. At my party, with all those that I miss so dearly.

I understand now why you jumped.

I love you, Amelia.