It’s been two years. Why is she still crying?
Bella’s face is stricken with grief. Her tears are a steady stream down her face.
“I’m here,” I say, but she can’t hear me. She doesn’t see me.
No matter what I do, Bella keeps crying.
I kneel beside her, watch as her hands claw at my pillow, her face distorted. She’s no longer the beautiful sister I knew, but the girl who can’t move for sake of missing me. I don’t like this new Bella.
I may be dead, but my heart can still break.
It’s breaking now.
I put my hand on her shoulder. Her brown hair looks black under the blanket of darkness. There is no light in her room except the glow that radiates from my form.
But, I think again, she cannot see me.
She does not feel my hand try to comfort her, doesn’t feel me embrace her. She doesn’t see that she should not be crying, that I am right here, that she still has a life to live and things to do and people to love.
I did this to her.
I look at the ground. I don’t know what I’m looking for, but I find it. My diary, my private, horrific diary, lies splayed across the floor like a piece of evidence in a crime scene. My heart drops, and my eyes lose their ability to blink. All those inner thoughts, those hateful words. Harsh, red pencil scrapes at the paper, indenting it with all the thing I thought were against me, all the things going on in my head. I can’t count the amount of times the word ‘kill’ had been etched into that book.
I look back to my sister. My pillow is soaked with her tears. The comforter has been kicked, messed around. It’s tangled around her legs. Suddenly she curls her whole body up as small as she can, and whispers, choking out the words, “It’s my fault.”
That hits me hard.
“It’s not your fault!” I say to her, grabbing her shoulders. “Look at those words, those are my… my…”
I pick up the book. The page that it’s open to has a small message scribed into the corner.
Bella doesn’t care about me. She doesn’t even ask how I am.
Oh no.
Why did I write that? Of course she cares. Look at her now, a curled up mess because I left her two years ago.
Two years ago.
I thought I’d be dead and forgotten in less than a month. They’d clear out my room, maybe make it into an art room for Bella.
But the room is still the same. Nothing is different. My mother… my mother…
Suddenly the room changes. I call out for Bella, but she is gone, my room is gone. Now I’m in a kind of office. There are two people in the room. Someone I don’t know, and my mother.
Mum sits, silent, in the chair across from the woman. Her eyes look empty.
“Is Gordon coming?” the woman asks, a little confused. Mum doesn’t move.
“He… he couldn’t handle it. It’s been hard on all of us, but… Gordon… he, he couldn’t- he couldn’t-” Mum bursts into tears, cradling her head in her hands. A hand is placed comfortingly on her shoulder, but she doesn’t look up.
Dad? I think. Did he…
“He left,” mum finishes for me. “I don’t blame him, though. Nothing’s been right since… well, since… since…”
Mum breaks down again, and this time she doesn’t return. She just keeps crying and crying, and the woman keeps comforting and comforting, and all I can do is watch.
The scene changes. Dad, this time.
He sits in a chair at a house I faintly recognise. He stares at nothing. His eyes are empty, like mums.
A man I recognise as one of dads friends walk in. He speaks to him, but, like dad, I don’t seem to hear anything he says. He leaves, and dad continues to stare, unseeing.
We both just sit there for a very long time.
Suddenly pain jolts through my wrist, and I double over, screaming. Dad flinches. Did he hear me?
The pain stops, dad looking around, as though trying to distract himself. But then his mind defies him, and I’m bleeding again, blood pouring down my arm, and dad is screaming too.
…
I jolt upright. There is a sound, a loud sound, echoing around my room
Then, I realise, it’s my own screams.
I silence myself. Breathing heavily.
I’m alive.
A stinging comes from my wrist. There is a dab of blood squeezing through one of the healing cuts. I push my mouth to the skin, as though I am kissing it.
I have to stop.
If not for my own sake, then for theirs.
Because I love them.
And maybe that is reason enough to stay.
