It's A Long Ride Home, I'm Afraid. {Camren} ✔️

~{7}~

A/N: flashback chapters will be sprinkled in from here on out, and you'll know that they're flashbacks because the words will always be italicized.

It won't tell you whose perspective it's from, but it should be easy enough for you to figure it out.

~

Ten years ago, I was only twelve.

Ten years ago, my mother was dead.

Ten years later, I still don't think I got over it.

I remember being in the hospital that day with my father. Sofi was two years old at that time, and was with another relative for the day.

You'd never expect to see your own mother laying in her death bed when, in your eyes, she was practically a superhero.

My father warned me beforehand about the state my mother was in, and he told me to mentally prepare myself for when we would walk into her hospital room.

The sight I saw will haunt me in my nightmares for the rest of my life.

Never had I ever seen my mom in such a state. She looked so tired, so old. Almost as though the sickle cell anemia had drained all of the life out of her.

I wanted to cry the second I saw her.

I knew, even in my underdeveloped twelve year old mind, that she was already gone.

The woman I was looking at was no longer my mother.

She was a stranger. The person I'd grown to love and admire was gone from the world for good.

And so I wept.

I let the tears just fall.

Never in my life had I felt so empty. Never in my life had I wished for time to stop as much as I did in that moment.

Who was going to have more "growing up" talks with me as the years passed by? Who was going to watch me walk anxiously on my way to the first day of high school? Who was going to help me plan my quinceañera? My sweet sixteen?

Who was going to do the laundry, the cooking, the cleaning, the caring, and the loving that a mother did?

How could my father even hope to juggle all of those responsibilities?

As much as I loved him, he could never do it all on his own. He would be gone working for the whole day just to make sure the family could have enough to live off of.

Slowly, I found myself beginning to take in all of those responsibilities instead. I learned how to cook, to clean, to keep things in check. I learned how to do everything my mother did without  being a mother myself.

The years kept passing and passing from that point on. What happened soon became a distant memory.

Sometimes, Sofi would come home asking, "Kaki, how do I solve this math problem?" or, "Kaki, can you help me spell this word?"

And I would be there for her.

I made a promise to at least be a good big sister, and to assist my father in giving her the best life possible.

To this day, she doesn't remotely remember our mother. Memories, in her mind, had to be reinstated by old photo albums and prehistoric looking tapes that you had to be lucky enough to get to work.

All she's really ever known is a hard working father, and a sister who was sometimes too caught up in her own grief.

Sofi, as I've said, was only two when Mami passed. A child usually doesn't start retaining memories until they're three, so it's understandable why she can't remember.

And I feel pity towards her. She'll never be able to experience the bond between mother and child until she began a family of her own someday.

It's so easy for her to forgot Mami and to move on, because it's as the saying goes.

You can't truly miss what you never knew you had.

But there's also a part of me that is happy that she won't ever have to fall victim to the voices that haunt my mind.

I swear, sometimes I can so very clearly hear my mother when trying to recall each memory we once shared.

I hear her laugh, her cry, the love she expressed in her voice, and for a moment it felt like if I just reached out far enough, I'd be able to grasp onto her. Pull her in for a hug.

And then I remember her wake, her funeral, and her gravesite.

And I realize yet again she's truly gone.

It's like realizing she's dead all over again, and all the pain and sorrow returns to you for a split second. Almost as if you're being thrown into this reoccurring nightmare that is seemingly impossible to escape.

But all along, I've known the one solution to ending the tragic feelings I'd kept locked up inside.

I would have to let her go.

And as I thought it over countless times, I didn't think I'd be able to do it.

However, eventually I found it in myself to keep moving along. I told myself that it's what Mami would've wanted me to do.

So I did.

I let her go.

Or at least, I thought I did.

And there are still some nights where I cry to myself over it, because the reality of the situation is the worst of all to cope with.

Slowly, I begin to forget about her too.

~