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I lived in a one story apartment with papi Isabelle and Marina. We weren't exactly struggling but we also would have been better off if he weren't an elementary teacher but i didn't mind. Life was great. I was fourteen with a boyfriend who also happened to be my best friend. My two best friends and me made a perfect trio with the occasional appearance of my boyfriend. I lived with my mother part time and we went back and forth on weekends. My grades were ok and my classmates were bearable. My mother was healthy and well and also my best friend. She struggled with mental health but she was getting better, going to yoga and therapy more often.
But then she was gone. Like a whisper in the wind, gone without a trace. It all happened when she was supposed to pick me up from school. I waited for one, two, three hours when I realized things were wrong. Marina picked me up at seven, finally and didn't speak till we arrived at our mothers house. I begged and begged her to tell me what was going on while she and Isabelle looked at me with sympathy in their eyes but also grief for themselves. Finally they relented and said that mom went missing. I yelled and screamed and cried out but that didn't change that she was gone. It's been a year since she went missing. The police stopped looking for her after only a week despite our pleading and they claimed it was most likely suicide, that her unhealthy relationship with her boyfriend had most likely caused it and that they'd had millions of cases and we should just drop it. In a way I lost everything that day. My siblings stayed in their rooms, only coming out to retrieve supper only to eat in our own rooms. We moved all our things from our moms to our fathers since her boyfriend decided to sell it and take the money. We tried to fight for it in court but it was a halfhearted effort and since our mother had been struggling with money, his case was more credible.
Her sister arranged a funeral for my mother and my siblings spoke, their speeches barely decipherable since they could hardly breathe without sobbing. I simply recited the lyrics to out favorite song in a monotone voice that wasn't my own. It was too much really. Funerals were for the living not the dead. My siblings and I rarely spoke and my father treated us as if we were porcelain dolls. Me and my sisters were required therapy by my father for a couple of months at the very least. I hated every second of it and acted like I was fine so I wouldn't have to endure it longer, my sisters sharing a similar experience. I still went to school since my father didn't want my academic career to fail simply because of a tragedy. It wasn't as bad as i thought it would be and my friends still stayed by my side, although my boyfriend was too afraid to get hurt from my cloud of grief and broke it off only to date someone else in our friend group. I shrugged and acted like it didn't matter. At that point I didn't care enough to be heartbroken for I had already lost my everything so nothing else really mattered. I stopped trying from that point forward. I stopped fixing my appearance or apparel and wore the same articles of clothing I'd had since she had been alive. They were far too small but I couldn't seem to part with them. I still couldn't even listen to the songs we would sing together or withstand a single note from the song she wanted to dance with me to at my quincenera, which had been canceled accordingly to my wishes. The dress she helped me pick out was in the back of my closet, unopened since the day we bought it. I tried to move on, tried to change myself my style and just get over it but I would always fail whenever the process started with donating clothes I couldn't bear to part with. I looked and sounded normal for the most part save for my small and outdated clothes but no one questioned it even though I knew I probably got so much crap from it behind my back but I didn't care.