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Entry Four

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<I'm not sure how this girl seemed to put in a virus without even being able to... oh, never mind.>

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Do funerals usually suck? I mean, all of the ones I've been to have really sucked. That sounds way more insensitive than I meant it to. But in all honesty, when I die y'all better be playing that bombass playlist from my Youtube account and mourning that I couldn't have more normal taste.

Like, thanks for the memories, bitch.

<The girl snorts, but when she stops laughing the smile fades from her face, and her eyes look more pained and world weary for someone so young. She doesn't talk for two minutes.>

We had my dad's funeral while mom was still in a wheelchair. So, maybe two or three weeks into our "stay" with SHIELD. My dress was itchy, and the air was cold and wet. They cremated my dad, and they buried his ashes under a willow tree next to his mom. My mom cried. I don't really remember any of the people there. There was a man on a bench who gave me an ice cream cone and waited with me as my mom said goodbye. I didn't think I'd ever see him again, thought maybe I'd imagined it, but life is mysterious. Especially considering I can see him right now, trying for the fifth time this minute, unsuccessfully I might add, to do a headstand. I don't think he's taking this well.

It took two more weeks for us to be released, for lack of a better word. We never went back to our apartment- someone put everything in storage for us. Too many memories. Maybe when I get out- if, I get out- I'll go and look through them. I don't know why I didn't before.

But my mom, she couldn't go back. She thought it was her fault, everything that had happened to me and to her and to my dad. I never knew why. It's not the sort of thing you can explain to a kid. It wasn't her fault, but she still felt the guilt.

<There's another absent minute of dramatic and depressed staring into space before she notices she's zoned out. Note: [redacted]>

Oh, yeah. No one could ever explain what happened for that year overseas. My mom and I traveled for a year, all over the world, looking for something she could never really explain. But we traveled literally everywhere- for an entire year we lived out of mostly hotel rooms, apartments of my mom's friends, anywhere we could, really. 

We talked to monks, hippies, medicine women, grandmothers- anyone who had any sort of cure, we went. Most of them were simple doctors, just kind of doing what they could with what they had. A bunch were fakes, for sure. One or two might have actually had magic, although I could never really tell. Could have been what they were smoking. I mean Jesus, the second hand smoke I would have had...

We were in India, I think, when we heard about the mysterious monastery. Some old wrinkly lady heard us talking to someone on the street and sat us down in the dusty alley, which was actually super shady and we probably should have died if I think about it. Not to talk smack about India, we were just in an inconvenient place, as far as it could go for a woman on crutches and her HOH daughter. But anyway, she tells us about this place in Nepal, where people with "uncurable ailments" went, and came back "cured". She sure as hell convinced my mom, and with what I think was the last of our money not locked away from us in some hidden safe, we took a flight to Nepal to find a place we weren't totally sure existed.

Ah, fuck, it's collection time. Well, the saga will continue. I'm the one who has to be patient.

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End of entry.

Sorry this one was so short, I figured if I kept going it would just get too lengthy. I will try to update soon, if my procrastination permits.

Published May 12, 2019. 547 words.