The empty swing creeks as it rocks back and forth with brief pushes from the wind. The merry-go-round has been spinning wildly ever since the clouds descended and smothered the sun. The children who I’d been watching play have long since abandoned the idea of staying just five minutes more. The grey scares them and that frightens their parents even more.
I don’t know why I’m still sitting here in the cold, allowing my toes to be frozen off. I had come outside just for a few minutes… just to see that lives beyond mine existed. Or perhaps I came to torture myself as my betraying eyes are always seeking out parents interacting with their kids. They take those little moments for granted and I don’t know if I envy them or pity them. Perhaps both. And then the darkness descended. Just when I had begun to lose myself in that simple joy of existing and watching people smile. It all happens so fast, without any concept of time, without any apologies, without any warnings.
It’s a wonderous thing to think about the depth of change, the five letters that hide behind the guise of life. For isn’t that what death is too? A part of life.
Death does not bother with a knock, it’s a silent storm that tears through your home and leaves shards of broken glass and shredded curtains. That’s what my mother’s was, at least.
I used to question the length of life, how it did not seem to speed up at all, how I always seemed to be stuck in the middle of exams, in the middle of the drama that comes with a teenager’s life. Now I question its brevity. How does a healthy, glowing forty-two-year-old wither away to something as inconsequential, something as common as a bee sting?
One minute she’d been standing there, eyes laughing, a dimple in her right cheek, her blonde hair a halo around her face and then with the buzz of an annoying insect, came the sound of her choking on her breath.
I do not like to dwell on what happened after.
And against that minute that swallowed my lifetime, these months pass as though they are fleeting, as though they’re meant to. I cannot find their meaning; I cannot figure out what they are meant to be. It’s a causation of the fact that I cannot live without her, I never could. She would go away for an hour, and I would miss her until she came back. Now I know she never will.
My father says that she was like snow. So cold on the outside but if you looked close enough, you’d find the beauty. You couldn’t look away once you had noticed. Always changing. Always fascinating. And once you held it in your warmth long enough, it melted.
I could never see her as he described. I had never associated her with the cold until now. To me, she’d always been like the sun. Beautiful. Wonderous. Bright. As soon as she entered the room, you’d know that she would demand your attention. A constant force that could bring vitality to the life around her. Aureate. Precious. That’s why I can sit in the dark and bear the cold. That’s why I don’t need the sun to shed light because I know there isn’t any left in the world anymore. I’m used to the darkness.
It’s a testament to how much my life has changed that I’m not scared of it anymore. I used to be. I used to be a lot of things. I used to be happy. Content but never grateful enough. Satisfied but never sated with the things I had. Awkward in the face of any laughter that wasn’t my parents’. Funny to the people I did know. Stoic to the people I didn’t. An overachiever who lived just for her parents to be proud of her. The golden child.
I’m none of those things now.
Another change feels a distant thing after the one life just put me through.
I startle when it thunders. The first sign of rain. I get up clumsily on my feet, shoving some hair out of my face and swinging my schoolbag over my shoulder simultaneously. My breaths cloud in front of my face as I rush to the pavement. I make it to the porch of a dusty old café in time, just as the clouds burst open and rain starts pouring down with a vengeance.
I watch it all happen silently.
The grey clouds seem unending and although I know the sun will come out soon after the storm, I know I will have to live through it all the same.
Age- 15