I think the saddest thing of all is that she'd just bought a new therapy light. Emily was so excited about it too; I'm pretty sure she talked about it for the whole week after she placed the order. I imagine she must have checked the tracking on it once a day.
That was one of the things we all loved most about our Emily; even when she was a total wreck, she was so easily excited about the smallest of things. You could get her amped just discussing plans for a walk in the park, we joked that she must be part golden retriever. Then again, maybe she had to be.
We both grew up rough, her parents divorced when she was young, but not young enough that she didn't understand what was happening. I remember the sleepovers when the shouting started, I'd watch her face turn to stone. The smile never left, but you could see the storm in her head, the way her muscles petrified. She put on that brave face for her mom, I think. It was the only kindness she could offer.
It wasn't enough.
Afterwards she ended up living with her Dad; he was a nice enough guy, but she never forgave him for remarrying two months after the funeral. He took care of her, he did the things a father must but rarely the things a father should. I don't think the man really loved her, it didn't strike me that he was a person capable of love.
My parents, however, loved each other very much. That much was clear. But I don't think they cared much for me or my little brothers. I was more of a parent than they ever were, and I grew to resent them all for it. I moved out with Emily when I was seventeen and haven't spoken to anyone in my family for five years.
We didn't have much but we did have each other. It was a small house and we shared a bedroom because it was all we could afford, but it never felt like we had less than we needed. Emily said it was like a never ending sleepover. Not much of a surprise considering we'd been best friends since elementary; bonding over our issues and boy band crushes in equal parts.
In all that time I never really thought she was as sad as me.
I guess what I never noticed was that she always had something nice to say about other people as if she'd written lists of all her favorite things about them. Emily had an answer for everything, advice for every situation. It seemed like she was on the right track, but I suppose what that really meant is that she'd tried everything, and I guess none of it worked.
They say that sometimes when it feels like a person went from zero to sixty in an instant, it's actually because you failed to realize how long they'd been at fifty-nine. She hid it well, like she still wore that stone mask from when she was little.
Needless to say it was a surprise to everyone when she washed up on shore just a few miles from the bridge. She kept her note in an envelope, vacuum sealed in plastic, and stapled to the inside of her pocket. Her father just left it on her desk when he came by to pack up her things. He didn't even open it. I did. It was short and to the point, and it was addressed to me.
It was an apology.
I was so shocked that my first thought was how brilliant of an idea it was to keep the note with her, so that nobody would find it until it was already done. It still hurts to think how long she must have been planning it, how much clear and lucid thought she'd put into it. Emily wasn't the type to snap, after all, she kept a calendar on the fridge and marked off every day, she kept a strict routine and wrote down the smallest of things on a schedule. I don't think she'd ever lost her keys.
I couldn't have stopped her. Now that I think about it, I doubt I could have, even if I'd known.
It took a week for me to figure out why she'd done it; she was so excited about that therapy light. Her schedule for the week was fuller than it had been for months. I thought maybe things were getting better. I didn't discover the truth until I came across the lamp sitting on her desk neatly repackaged and decided I'd give it a try. It's hard to say whether the laughing or the crying came first when I plugged it in, and it didn't turn on.
Emily stopped marking the calendar the day it arrived.
There's a lot I hate about life, a lot of questions, the answers for which I often pray. It hurts to think about how my Emily was bright and sweet and beautiful, how she lit up every room, perhaps because she swallowed the darkness. It hurts that she deserved the world but instead she got a defective therapy light, and it hurts that she never told me, and I never asked.
But above all, what hurts the most, what still makes me so angry at the world, is how much she did to fight off the darkness, how many supplements were neatly organized on her desk, how many self-help books were alphabetically ordered on her bookshelf, how incredibly brave she was in the face of her demons. She was trying so hard, so hard not to give up. And I wasn't trying at all when I killed myself.
