My vision was still blurry and I could hear what my mother was saying, but I didn’t understand.
“Mom, what did you just say?”
“Why would a 14-year-old want to hang themselves?” My mother repeated this several times, but she was so calm and mysterious. I couldn’t believe that she didn’t say hello first.
I said, “Wait, mom… I do not understand what you mean? Who are you talking about?” of course, it never clicked that she could be talking about Maggie. I sat up in bed and said, “Mom, let me open my eyes a bit, I don’t understand what you’re telling me here. Are you saying that Maggie hung herself?”
I know it seems weird that I couldn’t understand, but even as my mother spoke and I heard the words, understanding the situation may have been more of a denial. I’ve never ever felt like that before. I was completely detached from the real world and because of this new sleep schedule I was trying to get used to, I thought that this could actually be a horrible nightmare.
My mother was still on the other line and she was just trying to analyze the whole thing. She’s always been good at that, but this, to me, was not the time. She kept saying things about backpack straps, the closet, and paramedics, but I still couldn’t believe this was real life. I reached my hand over to my leg and punched my thigh as hard as I could. I just wanted to make sure that all of what I was experiencing right now was absolutely not a dream.
I felt it and it didn’t jerk me awake from this nightmare. All of a sudden the words came crashing back to me, all at once. They were loud and I was no longer in this muddled phase. It was all really happening and the words that kept coming out from the telephone attached to my ear, I didn’t want to hear it anymore.
I stood up and started to walk out of my room, I felt drunk and weighted down. It was as if a giant boulder had suddenly been placed on my back. I tried to run through the hallway to meet the light that was coming straight into the living room, where I could see people who had been laughing until I entered the room. I must have looked like I was in complete shock because my dad asked me what was wrong.
As soon as he finished asking, my whole body collapsed on the floor, the phone flew across the room and I screamed at the top of my lungs, “NOOOOOOO!!!!! PLEASE TELL ME THIS ISN’T REAL! PLEASE GOD! THIS HAS TO BE A DREAM AND I’M GOING TO WAKE UP!” I could still hear my mom talking on the phone, but she was muffled by the green shaggy carpet.
It seemed like 20 years had passed in a single moment. All of those years were bad and packed full of loss and dead dreams. I thought about the things that I wanted to teach her. The things that I wanted to do when she was an adult like taking road trips together and raising our families together. I thought of her as a baby, crawling around and learning new words. All of these memories started popping into my head as if I was seeing HER whole life pass before my eyes.
The phone was lying on the floor and my dad walked over to pick it up. He talked to my mom briefly and hung up. I was still on the floor when he came over and helped me to a chair. I was sobbing uncontrollably. It felt like I was breathing the heaviest air as if I had run 50 miles without stopping and couldn’t and would never catch my breath again. The room was filled with thickness and moving wasn’t an option either. It would be hours before I could stop crying.
To Be Continued…
