Let's Pretend We Never Happened

Chapter 21- Fixing It

Chapter 21- Fixing It

Chicken Soup For The Teenager’s Soul and actual chicken soup provided me with the consolation I needed to face this dreadful misery.

I couldn't find comfort in much else at this point. The purple walls in my childhood bedroom looked old and dreary. The long, full-length mirror I’d possessed since birth had now revealed a crack- a sign I shouldvet noticed foreshadowing my terrible luck. My body felt as if it didn’t belong to me; I was uncomfortable with it and continuously found myself shaking me off, as if this were something that could just come off of me.

The feeling of dread swarmed like a plague through my body, shooting bad feelings in the form of darts to my head. My heart felt poisoned with ridicule and embarrassment, and my lungs no longer worked, as I felt I was grasping for every single breath of clean air.

 

It was all in my head, obviously. But the mind was arguably, the strongest part of one’s body.  

 

Of course, Brennan tried his best to understand. He encompassed me in a hug me an estimated forty six times and told me that it was okay countless more times than that. Nevertheless, at the end of the day, he was Brennan, and he knew that it would be best to leave me with a book and some warm, homemade soup- at least for some time. Brennan knew me, understood what I wanted, when I wanted it and respected my choices by abiding by them.

 

When I was ten, and my mother had just died, Brennan rushed to the the bookstore a few blocks away from the apartment (without permission, I might add) and procured what was to be my very first journal. The book brimming with empty lined pages, awaiting beautiful words, had been a deep purple shade (or rather, eggplant coloured) and had star-shaped sparkles all over it. Perfect for a ten year old in mourning.

 

I was in my room, face drowning in tears and drenched in snot, as if grief was the sole emotion I could ever feel. I considered my life to be over and ten year old me couldn't comprehend the difficult emotions I felt. He’d written a message with his already strong, rough hands, in beautiful penmanship, on the first page: ‘This is 4 my frend Piper becuz she is sad’

 

Of course I hadn’t written in the journal a lot. I wasn’t committed enough to write in it everyday but I wrote poems, and short stories (that now looking back, were terribly scribed) and in the midst of writing all of it, I had somehow found a way to overcome the initial first stage of grief of my mom’s passing. Without Bren being there by my side, I would’ve never been able to become who I was today.

 

Anne, who was now the rock in my life, was not in the right mindset at that time to be a parent of two tweens. She was fidgety, ambiguous, and acted similar to a ticking time bomb, ready to implode at any given moment. She would yell at no one in particular at times, or shout out blaming herself for her best friend’s death and other times, she was as quiet as an unanimated table. She’d been swept with sorrow and had met with dozens of grief counsellors, all of whom thought her a lost cause.

 

But she hadn’t been- at least not to Brennan. He saw Anne’s change of behaviour as just a coping method, and coaxed his mom gently, asking Dorothy, our neighbour, to make us our meals so Anne wouldn’t have to get out of bed. He’d sleep beside us on her master bed- me on the right, his mother on the left- and would stay awake until he made sure we both were in the depths of a deep somber. Come to think of it, the ten year old Bren wouldn’t have probably even slept a wink for months.