What He Made Me

Chapter 4 - Heartache

Chapter 4 - Heartache

I spend many days alone in this room. I notice faintly that Dante, Kalon and others whose names I do not know come to visit me, but their presence only just registers in my mind. I do not hear their words or feel their touch. I’ve completely shut down, I feel as if I’m dead inside, lost in my own world such as I was when I was in a comma. But in a way, it was so much worse. Although I could see and move, I didn’t. I kept my eyes firmly closed, and my body curled up in tight ball upon the bed.

When the sun comes up, I am granting with a sense of relief, knowing that my body will shut down and drag me into a dreamless sleep as steel shutters clamp over the windows, blocking out the rising sun. But this only registers very faintly, and as the days pass I feel myself losing touch with reality. I can feel myself sinking, fading away. Sinking, always sinking. Further and further into myself, lost in my own grief and pain. After the first couple days, I lost the ability to cry; instead I am left with this empty feeling. 

My sister’s death has left a gaping hole where my heart once was and her absence is always so present; I clutch it desperately as I curl in on myself. The pain is agonizing. Knowing she’s gone, that’s she’s never coming back. She’ll never hold me again; tell me that it’ll be okay, that we’ll get through it together. All the days merge into one another. Dragged into sleep as the sun rises, rudely awoken when it sets, no choice in the matter. I stay led on the bed, sinking. Losing myself, not being able to find my way back.

Riley was everyone and everything to me, as I was her. She was my best friend, my sister, my double and my anchor. We were each other’s world. Being identical twin sisters, and being each other’s anchors when times got bad. She was always there to hold my mask firmly in place when my walls began to crumble down as the grief and pain of life we lived for many years took over, and I was always there to do the same for her. My whole existence was to get by, with her by my side.

Don’t get me wrong, although our childhood had been hard, growing up in foster and care homes, struggling with our parent’s death, we did find happiness. With Hayley and John. We were happy and content living with them, and they had even formally adopted us. They were the only people we had ever let in over the years since that horrible night we watched our home burn. We even learnt to trust them, although we never relied on them as children normally did their parents. We leant on each other, always had each other, we relied on each other.

Now she was gone. I had no one. I shied away from the world, not even understand where I was or who I was. I wasn’t Remmi.

My father had always told me to count my blessings when I was feeling down, and even in my state I did try to do this once. But, all I could come up with was that I was merely alive. He had always said: 'Remmi, the very fact that we talking now means that you are alive, and therefore you have every reason to smile and none at all to frown!' 

But then what became clear is that I wasn’t alive. This thing I am, I’m not alive. My heart doesn’t beat; my skin is not warm as blood flows in my veins.  No, I was not alive. So what was left? Nothing.

There was no meaning, nothing left to live for. She was gone, they were all gone. Even my true self was gone.  Danté, the monster, had killed her. He’d killed me, and made me this creature, a monster just like him.

At first, the pain was unbearable. The hunger and the thirst I felt seemed to rage across my whole body, but soon enough even that left. And the emptiness truly took over. I felt weak and lifeless, I felt dead. Dead inside and outside. I felt myself wasting away and didn’t care. Maybe I would truly die, and be released from this world, which holds me prisoner, separating me from my family.