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A sunny morning, a day where wearing a full-sleeved shirt added as another one of my actions that screamed my inability to make proper choices. The forecast did say 24º was the lowest it’d be. I’d heard it while I was shoving the countless half-empty worksheets inside the satchel. Where was my mind? Was this it? Was this how I’d be living from now on? Is this my future?
The road to the school looked deserted. Cars were racing past. Riders on bicycles glided against the wind on the other side of the road. People walking hurried steps so eager to reach where they were going… maybe it wasn’t deserted after all. But it was empty. As empty as it could be. No one on my right protecting me from the vehicles that rushed through. No one beside me is singing songs with a skip in their step. No one to tell me about the most bizarre theories about how the world would end. About how it would stop moving, once and for all. There is just an empty spot, more space for air to pass through
Seated at the back middle of the classroom, the scrawls on my notebook took more of my attention than the chalk moving across the board in front of the room. My facial muscles moved into a solemn smile. I looked around listlessly, hoping I’d see the bright shoes you always insisted on wearing, or the ash-coloured hair bobbing up and down. But to my dismay, the seat across from me was empty.
Nothing
I stared at the bag I carried to school with a half heart stitched across it. It was supposed to be a pair. The pieces that would have to come together to seem beautiful. The pieces, if left alone, would only mean despair.
I don’t know what happened after that. Maybe my mind is doing me a favour by blurring up the details. The details of how bland everything seemed, and the memory of how lonely I was, for the very first time. Currently, I’m sitting on the floor of my room. Laying down more than I’m sitting. My head is lying on the pink striped bedspread. YOUR pink bedspread talking to Mr. Brown and Mr. Brownie- the identical bears on the top of the cabinet. They look at me with beaded eyes as I recall your stories, your antics that got us in trouble, the love you gave and the happiness you brought.
I’m paying attention to everything I’m doing. Every breath I take feels like I’m stealing it away from you. My eyes are closed. “She’s not gone”, I keep repeating to myself like a mantra.
“… yet”, my brain supplies and I cannot refute it. I cannot refuse the truth.
It was the day before yesterday, or the day before that. I don’t remember. I’ve lost track of time. I don’t even remember what you looked like when you didn’t have ‘pain’ written all over your face. I don’t remember what you looked like when you still had a head full of hair so thick. I don’t remember how you smiled at me like there was always a tomorrow. There was no use in remembering it. Cause there will be none anymore. At least none that I am excited about.
My head conjures up fleeting memories, none of them so good anymore. One pops up in my mind, so vague and distant it almost seems like it didn’t happen. Many factories surrounded the cotton fields and in the middle, us. Running hand-in-hand with matching shirts through the field. The sun was setting, the tall built factories’ smoke covering the rays. A hint of sunlight flashed across your face and you looked ethereal. That was 11 years ago, when we were 4. That year mum and dad went for a vacation leaving us with grandma. I wonder if that was when it started.
Another memory. Very recent. Just a few days back. This time I see a big room that is suffocating me. The plain white walls and an even plain bedsheet. You hate the bedsheet. Hate that it isn’t pink. Maybe that is what you hate the most out of all this. Outside the room, the doctor is breaking the news to our parents. Leaning against the door with a small gap, we peer at them.
“Asbestosis… late-stage... cancer”,
Mum has a stoic look on her face, dad has broken down and is sobbing against her. I turn back. You look unfazed. Or maybe you just felt too many emotions to a point where you felt none.
“B-But how?” dad is wailing now. I lean in closer.
“The X-ray shows the exposure to the fibres and since There has been no history recorded from both sides of the family, it is unlikely to have been transmitted genetically.”
I cannot move anymore. My feet are stuck.
“Too late for surgery… too much risk.”
This cannot be happening. NO, we had our entire lives ahead of us. This isn’t supposed to be happening.
“1 and a half years at most with necessary treatment.” I hear a muffled scream. Maybe mum broke down too.
This is not true. Maybe the reports swapped. Everyone makes mistakes… right? But I knew this was no mistake if her coughs were anything to go by.
“She cannot leave me alone.”
I screamed in my head. NO, this was no time to be thinking of me. I muster up enough strength to look at my older twin. I cannot see her entire face through the tears, but I remember her eyes. Vividly. Those eyes told me she knew. She knew this would all happen, that she’d prepared for the worse and the worse had happened.
I broke down.
Broken out of my trance, I stare at the ceiling; the lights turned blue washing over another wave of melancholy over me. Through the open door, I can hear dad’s conniptions, which were not unfounded. Mum is weirdly quiet and has been that way for the past 2 days. She is alone in the hospital room, hopefully under Anaesthesia. Everyone’s reactions were diametrically different, so different. The entire ordeal was finally getting to me.
“Would it have been different if I made proper choices?”
If I had informed our parents about the seemingly never-ending coughs we brushed off as a cold. If I had known that the chest pains were not because my jokes were too funny? The answer is, I don’t know.
Maybe I should’ve given more thought about the theories she’d come up with. Maybe then I’d have found a way of living when everything was so bleak. But again, maybe not. I doubt there’d have been anything that would help me survive from this feeling of utter loss.
It shocked me the first day. No amount of crying was cathartic enough. Then I stopped. And here I am again, thinking. Thinking thoughts that may not be true at all. Thinking of the betrayal. Thinking of the promises you made, saying we’d be together forever. All the lies you said. I am angry at believing in you. I am frustrated. You made me think we were each other’s worlds. And now? My world is disappearing. What am I to do now?
I feel like a person from a snow globe whose glass was shattered by the very hands that made it. This perfectly made bubble you covered me with. The bubble that was my life, the only world I knew. The world you created to shelter me from horrors I never should’ve known. I can’t help but feel helpless.
I know these are unreasonable and you are a victim to this cruel world as much as I am. If not more. But this is a nature I cannot fight. Acknowledging this, I will keep going. To love, is to lose. We’re humans, after all. Mortals. And for us, forever does not exist.