Your Mark on Me

Chapter 41: Catching up

Hi guys, sorry for the delay in updating! Check out the video above, it's a song called 'Your Mark on Me' that I wrote especially for this story. Hope you enjoy x

Present

Maddie is never going to be my friend. She's excellent at her job. She's a big part of why I am where I am today, the reason why I own the house of my dreams, my own grand piano and an expensive car, all from what I earned in the six years in which she's been my manager. She knows how to draw the best in me, how to turn me into the most effective version of myself. But she does things a friend wouldn't do.

Such as waiting until after the concert to tell me that my mother was rushed to the hospital with a stroke, hours before.

I understand why she did it - one doesn't just cancel a concert at Carnegie Hall, on the day of the performance. Yet I can't forgive her. 

At least she had the common sense to have a taxi waiting for me, the moment I got off the stage.

I rush to the yellow cab, holding my purse above my head. It's raining.

"To the airport, please."

I sink in the backseat, a claw of fear clutching at my chest. I don't want to lose her. I can't stand losing anyone else.

***

It's strange to think about it, but life goes on even after these things happen. Yes, for a while the pain is so intense, so shattering that you feel like you'll never piece yourself back together. Life as you knew it seems out of the question. You feel guilty for being alive, for breathing, when they don't anymore. You hear their voice at night, and wake up only to take in the emptiness; it stares right back at you, like a black empty hole, the only sign that something's missing.

And then, there's the regret. The tens and hundreds of ways in which things could have played differently. If only you'd said something else, or done something differently, or not done it at all. You construct a parallel reality out of each split second that contained the possibility to have saved them. In all these realities, these dangerous realms of "what if's", the one you love is still alive. If only I hadn't forgotten my purse. If only I'd woken up earlier that day. If only I hadn't chased him. If I hadn't met him, at all, he would still be alive.

But eventually, both pain and guilt subside, and life goes on. 

Or so it happened to me.

I spent my seventeenth birthday in hospital. Concussion, bruises and scrapes, and a broken tibia, on which they operated. The titanium rod and plate are still in my bone.

I couldn't go to the funeral.

Perhaps it would've given me closure. Perhaps if I saw him lying there, lifeless, his eyes closed, his mouth taut in a straight line that would never move again, his hands cold and rigid on his chest, his whole body stiff, all warmth gone, all strength crushed, the thousands of subtleties of his eyes and face, his smiles, his frowns, his different ways of laughing, the subtle modulations of his voice, all frozen in one silent, perpetual expression — perhaps then I would have truly understood that it was real. That he was gone. That, no matter how long I'd wait for, he wouldn't come back.

It was the end of September when they admitted me out of the hospital. I missed the first few weeks of school. Mom had me already transferred to a high school in Philadelphia, close to the Curtis Institute where she taught. In the new place, there was nothing to remind me of him.

It was strange how easily I was able to get on with life. How I watched life go by without feeling like I truly was in it. How I couldn't feel joy or sadness, or anything at all. How nobody, including me, realised how much I was hurting. How I hadn't even been able to cry, at all.