Seventeen year old Safaya Bennett must navigate young adulthood under the stresses of her sins, her crumbling relationship with her twin sister, Rue, and a crippling mental disorder that makes her very dependent on her relationship with Nate Jacobs...
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Life is arguably the most fragile thing in the universe. It's here and then it's gone and sometimes there's a choice of when it stays or goes.
It was Christmas Eve and here I was eating pancakes with Ali. He was upset with me, frustrated might be a better word to describe it, but he wasn't pleased with my behavior. After Jules left, I had no desire to stay clean. My sister being in the hospital stressed me out even more and even though she had been home for a couple weeks now, I still hadn't stopped using. Everything in my life was crumbling and the only thing I had control of was drugs. As much as I wanted to believe that last sentence to be true, I didn't have control of drugs.
Drugs had me in a chokehold.
Rehab and NA meetings always spoke of how a power greater than ourselves can restore us to sanity. I hated to break it to whoever made up that statement, but, there was never any sanity for me to return to. Ali thought that I was being a smart ass when I said that I didn't believe in God but I meant it. These last few weeks could have changed my mind but they only further solidified that a higher power like that doesn't exist. No matter how much people want it to.
"If God didn't believe in you, you wouldn't even still be breathing." Ali adjusted himself in his seat, taking pride in his statement.
I brought my knees closer to my chest, sighing as I processed his words. They disappointed me and frankly, it only frustrated me even more. "So you're saying the reason my Dad died is because God didn't believe in him?" I questioned. The look of sorrow on his face was enough to tell me that he didn't think his theory through. There were holes in it and I just poked right through them. "Did my sister lose her baby because God just gave up on them?"
"Rue, uh, that's not what I was saying--"
I scoffed. "There's nothing that makes me angrier than that fucking argument." I looked down at my feet, taking a deep breath to calm myself.
"Hey, that's, that's not what I was saying--" Ali tried to backpedal but I was too hyper focused in this conversation to let it pass.
I shook my head. "You know, cause every time someone survives like, a mass shooting or some terrible fucking earthquake, they always say, you know, 'I survived for a reason. God saved me for a reason. I have a purpose.'" I frowned just thinking about it. "And then I think to myself, like, okay, well what you're saying is that your life is more important than that six-year-old who died that day. Or the newborn who died that day, or anybody fucking else who died that day." I scoffed. Ali sat quietly and let me finish, knowing that what he had said triggered me and set me off into a rant that had been sitting in the back of my head for a while now. "Your life has a purpose, right? Well, why does your life have a purpose and my Dad's doesn't? Because I could argue that my Dad's purpose was to raise me and my sisters."
I stopped talking. I could feel the lump in my throat forming, choking up my words as I tried to speak. I was more open than Saf in talking about my Dad. Rarely did I begin to cry when mentioning him but things changed around the holidays. I guess because the holidays were a larger reminder of everything my Dad was missing and would miss as my sisters and I grew up. Graduations, weddings, birthdays, all things he would never get to be part of because he wasn't here anymore.
