Her Death, Not Mine

A Vague Summary of Hell

Currently Listening to: A Murder of One by The Counting Crows

TW: Implied Abuse, illness, death

Recently, my friends drove 5-9 hours from their houses to mine to celebrate the 4th. It’s tradition. I get a bit emotional when I think about it. How, since we were kids, every 4th — no matter the timeline. lives lived. lives lost. — we meet. I have seen every version of them, and quietly wait for the versions still to come.

I think its what makes the past so unbearable, this sort of unconditional love we share. At least, when that focus on these versions of ourselves shifts…to me. Its hard, even now, for me to address it. Maybe its because the story is so big.

In my mind, it appears as this void. Absent of sound. Reminiscent of Hell — No, the space between. And, its so distant now. If I were to wade into the black, reach with extended arms, I imagine I’d bump into her. Slip into her skin.

The old me.

Her death happened alongside my mother’s diagnosis. I was sixteen. My mother was bedridden, on antidepressants, and dissolving before my eyes. I didn’t want to see her die and so, when my best friend/first love broke up with me, I met a boy who’d just gotten out of jail. This boy was a walking bruise. He was cedar smoke and gasoline. All sharp edges with a metal tongue.

And this boy ensured the old me died.

I look at it now like an assisted suicide. The thing that’s strange about wanting abuse is the belief that this want puts you in control. It slingshots you straight into the driver’s seat, starry-eyed. Soaked in benzene.

but I was never driving.

I was just some soggy sixteen-year-old who didn’t want to see their mom die. A world that took her from me didn’t make sense. The absolute, crippling pain that clotted my veins — it didn’t make sense. Nothing. Made. Sense. The only way I could think to survive was to make it make sense, and so, bruise boy it was. If Hell was a place, I was in it. And in it, I’d stay.

There’s a story behind all of this. It unwinds and bounces along the gyrus and sulcus of my brain like a ball of yarn fumbling down a wooden staircase. I could write you a book about it. Tie the dynamic between my parents and I into a neat, little bow for you. Slide it across the table. Explain to you that, since I was five, their pain has been my own. Another time, maybe.

I tell you this, though, to say: Bruise boy was only a span of 6 months.

Into the ashes, rose a phoenix. What a corny line. I’m no phoenix. If anything, I’ve discovered an inability to feel. Pain, to me now, arrives with the companion of logic. My armor is intellect. Pros and Cons. Yes? No? If not, then — this. I approach every misfortune as if I’m approaching a cadaver, my eyes wide and curious, immediately searching for the cause of death.

I pick apart every. single. thing. And, often, when I tell people this, when I attempt to introduce them to this world of mine, they innocently r eturn with possible cures. There is no cure, though. I’ve followed the dancing shadows off the wall and into the open air already. There’s no going back to that cave.

I am not bitter. I don’t feel regret. When I find that version of myself in the abyss, I hug her so tightly, our pulses merge. The melancholy that bleeds in “A Murder of One” is what drips from my hands as I hold her. Forever, it was the chorus:

All your life, is such a shame, shame, shame,

All your love, is just a dream, dream, dream.

Open up your eyes, you can see the flames, flames, flames,

Of your wasted life, you should be ashamed.

that I used to scream/sing to in my car, hemorrhaging tears. Teetering on the edge between the now and oblivion. The filth of our union felt permanent. The only remedy being a shot of bleach or a gun. And, what a perfect representation of him and I. Violent and rushed, as chunky and red as the salsa my mother used to make on vacations. He was constantly in my peripheral as I went on. As the years fell behind me. As my legs grew longer. My waist thicker. And as the edges that used to define that period of my life blurred, so did it’s reason.

I feared the victimization of myself because it existed in the reality that I’d never been in control. Never would be. For years, I treated this version of myself as an adult. Just an irresponsible woman who should’ve known better. You should’ve known better. But I do now, and in that reverie exists the knowledge that I was no woman. I was just a girl who was afraid of a world where her mother’s physicality was an urn and not a sun-soaked body. Someone she could talk to and hold.

My mom’s illness went into remission in 2021. All my friends that drove 5-9 hours for our annual reunion, slept in her living room with me. The Counting Crows did me a favor when they ended “A Murder of One” with:

Change, change, change,

Change, change, change.

because life did, and thank God for that.