Wearing My Smile | ✔

Sunday, October 19th, 2005

And at first everything was okay.

Until it wasn't. I didn't know where it went wrong.

Around a week before your sixteenth birthday, you'd been gone from the world for days. It didn't happen all at once. It was subtle, the signs, that I didn't really notice it.

At first you just stopped coming to the therapy. You said adamantly that you could use your left arm just fine even though I saw the way it still shook and how you dropped the things you'd been carrying in your left hand sometimes.

"Roo, for the last time, I'm fine."

"But the therapist thinks—"

"Well, he doesn't know what he's thinking! I keep telling him and you. It's okay now."

I let you get away with it. Perhaps because I thought you'd never lie about this. I don't know why I'd thought you'd never lie because you'd lied a lot, especially the last two years you'd been alive, even to me. I wonder sometimes if it was like what my therapist had said, that I'd blocked it all out because it was hard on me to process the fact that I am a work in progress. I could be having these sessions for the rest of my life just so I could function daily and I'm never going to fully recover.

I insisted that you told me right away when your left arm was bothering you again and you said of course and I believed you. Why did I ever believe you?

Maybe the reason why I'd been so ready to placate you was because of the guilt I'd secretly carried. The guilt that perhaps if I'd just reported your father's abuse when we'd been twelve and you'd been lying in that hospital bed. If I'd just disregarded my promise and told it to someone, you wouldn't have been in this situation. Maybe we wouldn't have been friends anymore but you'd have had your violin and it'd have been okay.

As long as you were happy, Sam. It was all I cared about.

But it hadn't happened and this was the reality so I told you, okay. Because I didn't know why I didn't notice it until it was too late. Maybe I was too always too stressed, too preoccupied with something else, but it had been weeks since the last time you opened your violin case and touched it at night before we went to sleep.

It didn't happen all at once, but even though you came into classes and your grades were getting better, you would be gone for the rest of the day. I didn't know where you were going. When I asked you, all you said was you needed time alone to think, which on hindsight I should have protested about, Sam. Hadn't you had enough time to be drowning in your thoughts already? Wasn't it the problem? That you had too much time not playing violin?

But every late evening, or sometimes during the dusk, you never failed to come home to me and we would be eating dinner and watching movies. Laughing and commenting about how stupid the plot was. Or we could be browsing silly videos online and I'd kiss you on the lips because I liked your smile and I liked how you were with me so I thought, okay. You needed time alone so I would give that to you and it was okay because before we slept I would remind you again that I believed everything would get better if we would just keep walking ahead. It was okay. Some nights you would smile and shift your head into where my neck and shoulder met and I would hold you until you fell asleep.

Some others you would stare at nothing and ask something like, "Do you really believe that, Roo?"

"Yeah, I do." I had to, didn't I? I refused to believe that that was all the situation could ever be.

And you would be quiet, alone with your thoughts. Sometimes I fell asleep waiting on you. Sometimes I would hear you say, "I believe you." before your breath evened out and you fell asleep.