It's a first draft, but yeah. Read it. Sorry for the stupid formatting.
Completion
You can feel it inside your head.
You don’t even notice the pain because you’re too busy trying to see past the shining orb that has been thrust into your eyes. And you try to turn off the light before you leave the bathroom. Wash your hands. Be reasonable.
Pretend your ears aren’t ringing louder than a jet engine. Notice, as you walk through the hallway – your heart is quickening and your stomach is tightening. Your hand meets the wall to keep you up. Balance long enough to make it to your bedroom.
In your bed, there is safety. You will sleep with just one blanket because sweat is streaming from your body. But just one blanket is enough. You will fall asleep and when you wake up, it will all be done.
But you are not there yet. You are still in the hallway. You think you are close, but the ball of light only lets you see the edges of your vision. The ringing drives deeper between your ears, and it is getting hotter. You are sweating, soaking your shirt so much that you just take it off because you are so close to your room, and nobody is home anyway.
You lean against the wall again and start to wonder if this time, you really are dying. If your last crusade to your bed will never finish, and you will die shirtless in the hall, too blind and deaf to even remember that yesterday, your mother’s eyes pierced into you when she told you that she wished she had never had a daughter. You are too busy trying to feel against the wall the pathway to the certainty of your bed.
And then—
You’re on the hallway floor, shirt in your moist burning hand. Your mother has come home and is asking you Amanda, are you okay.
***
In the evening, I woke up. My body was covered with cooled sweat, and the one blanket did not keep me warm. I had been holding my shirt to me as a slept, and I put it back on. I did not know how long I had been asleep, but my head no longer hurt, and my vision was clear. Had I been dying? I remembered wishing I was dead. It was an embellishment, looking back, a brash decision with no thought of the consequences—a migraine is nothing worth dying for.
But what is?
I wouldn’t die for my mother, or my father, or my best friend. I generally believe in the principle that people should treat everyone else in the way that they themselves would want to be treated. And I wouldn’t want anyone to die for me. To live the rest of my life knowing that I was only around because somebody else died – specifically, died so that I could stay alive – would equate to a life of guilt. Especially since I’m certain I wouldn’t have done the same for them. Unless they think like I do, and were just looking for a way out. If my best friend died for me, everyone would say “Wow, Lindsay is such a hero.” But if Lindsay had wanted to die, I know she wouldn’t commit suicide, because she cares too much about the people around her. She would never want to hurt them – even if they drove her to the point of suicide. So if she saw a bullet, flying at me, she could jump in front of it and fulfill her desire to be dead without looking selfish or like an angsty teen – as we are all doomed to appear, regardless of our motives. Instead, Lindsay is a hero and everyone will look at me and think “I wish Amanda was dead instead of Lindsay.” They will never say that though, instead they will say “You’re so lucky you had such a good friend.” And I will not be courageous enough to tell them that she only did it so that she wouldn’t have to suffer through life anymore, and used me for her own self-exterminating wishes. But Lindsay would never want to die. She is too content.
Lindsay is not as thoughtful as I am.
***
Knockknockknock. Three knocks. My mother was at the door. She opened it before I told her that it was okay to come in. She is much taller than I am, and much fatter too. She stopped paying for my clothes when she realized that the sizes I needed were a third of what she wore.
“You’ve been sleeping for a long time,” she said.
“Yeah, I had another migraine.”
“Hrmph.” She looked at me accusingly, like I did it to myself so that I could sleep all day. She was acting no differently than she did any other day. Maybe she didn’t remember that she told me she wished I hadn’t been born. Maybe she had thought it over so many times that the words became meaningless. “You should stop eating MSG, I heard on the radio that that causes a lot of neurological problems,” she said.
“I don’t think that’s it, Mom.”
“Well watch what you eat anyway. I can tell you’re gaining weight.”
I was not. But fighting her over such trivialities was pointless. She turned to my desk and began fiddling with my collection of old Halloween candy shaped into various monsters. Her thick dry fingers ran over the vampire, the werewolf, the ghost.
“You’re going to your father’s next weekend.”
“I know, Mom. You told me that two days ago.”
She looked sharply at me. “Don’t be a smartass,” she said. “I’m trying to take care of you.”
“Okay, I’m sorry.” I wasn’t sorry. But again, not worth fighting over.
“He has a new girlfriend, did I tell you?” she said much more quickly than she had intended.
“I think you mentioned it.”
“I don’t want you talking to her,” she said, eyes intensifying.
“What?” Even for my mother, that seemed ridiculous.
“I hear she’s a skank, and she used to be a meth addict. Your father could do better than that. You need to spend time with responsible adults, not trash like that.”
“But how can I not talk to her if I’m in the same house as her? When she comes up and says ‘Hi, you must be Amanda,’ I’m supposed to just walk away?”
My mother was getting angry. She pulled at her brown hair, where the gray streaks were starting to grow back in from the last ninety-dollar salon dye job. “You’re smart, figure something out.” She walked toward the door, but turned around before she was out of my room.
“Oh, you need to get up. It’s almost 8, and you should eat something. I don’t feel like cooking tonight.”
***
On Monday, I didn’t go to school. Lindsay had a car, so she picked me up three blocks from my house and drove us to the closest Safeway. We sat in the backseat and ate sandwiches from their deli counter. She paid for all of the food.
She was talking about her ex-boyfriend, spewing out lists of faults in his personality. “Jake never offered to pay for me when we went out. I mean, I wouldn’t have made him pay all the time or anything, but it would’ve been nice every once in a while. That’s what boyfriends are supposed to do, right?”
I nodded. “He was a dick anyway.” That was what she wanted me to say. I did not remind her that three months ago, he was perfect.
“But what did you do this weekend?” Lindsay asked.
“I had another migraine.”
“Oh shit, really? That’s like three in the last month or something.”
“Four.” My migraines were one of the few things I kept count of. “This was the worst though. I couldn’t see anything, and I ended up passing out in my hallway.”
“Wow, god. I’m sorry Amanda.” She referred to me by my name every time she felt like she had something serious to say. It wasn’t often.
“It’s okay, I just got up and went to sleep in my bed for a while, and then I felt fine.” I didn’t tell Lindsay about wanting to die for that one brief period of time between stumbling out of the bathroom and collapsing on the floor. “I heard my mom crying again last night.”
“Over your dad again?”
“I think so. He has this new girlfriend, and my mom got all worked up over it.” She was more than worked up. When she first found out about it, she threw pots across the kitchen, pulled part of her hair out, and shredded a pile of laundry that had been sitting in the living room – clothes that were both hers and mine. She did all this when I was at school, but made no attempt to clear up the evidence before I got home. I cleaned up for her and said nothing. I’m willing to believe that to this day, she still thinks that I don’t know how fake her calm front is.
Lindsay looked concerned, a turkey sandwich clutched between her hands. “Amanda, I’m really sorry that you have to go through all this. If you ever need anything let me know, okay?”
“Yeah, I know. Thanks.” I smiled at her.
“Are we going to go back to school?” she asked. Every time we skipped class, I could tell she felt a little bit uneasy.
“No. Let’s go to the lake.”
“But it’s so cold out!”
“I know. There won’t be anyone there, and we can just walk around. It’ll be an adventure.”
So we went.
***
While I was at the lake, my mother went to the hospital. Lindsay dropped me off at home around the time I would’ve gotten there if I had walked the long journey back from school, and as soon as I got there, I went to sleep. Just as I had began to dream, the phone rang. It was my father, from the intensive care unit.
I walked to the hospital, a little bit longer than my walk to school. I was too mystified to run. My mother was hit by a car? I didn’t even know that she left the house. What was she doing? What kind of car was it? Did the driver stop, or just keep going? Was there blood on the asphalt?
I got to the hospital, and a nurse instructed me to walk to the last room in the hallway to my left. I glanced into all the other rooms with open doors on my way to my mother. The patients were mostly all comatose.
I had never seen so many people so close to death. I had to consider if they were even people at all. You can’t have half of a person. Half of a body, but not a person. You can cut a piece of meat in half, and it’ll still fulfill its duty as meat – there’ll just be less of it. Is a whole person determined by how much of their brain is intact? How many car crashes they’ve been in? How long they can live without being hooked up to a machine? Maybe some people are born incomplete and spent their entire lives never knowing what they’re missing. Half of a whole. Three-fourths. Nine out of ten.
I reached the end of the hall. The last room – my mother. She looked like every other lifeless body in the corridor, its existence confirmed by a machine, every ping reminding us that this was, in fact, still a person. Not just a pile of organs and bones.
My father came out of the room. He was alone, no girlfriend. He hugged me. “Amanda, are you okay? I was worried about you walking here by yourself.”
“Yeah, I’m fine.” I didn’t get hit by a car.
He looked shocked as he gazed at my mother, tubes jammed all over her. “It’s terrible. The doctors have no idea how long she could be like this.”
I looked at her. There was dried blood all over her face and arms, and probably under her blue hospital gown too. My father hesitated as he spoke. “There’s an artery blocked off in her leg. It’s not getting any blood. They… they may have to amputate it.” He covered his mouth like he was horrified with himself for even saying it.
A piece of meat is a whole piece of meat, even if you cut it apart.
***
I went to school the next day. Really went. I didn’t tell Lindsay about my mother. She was too happy. Apparently she had called Jake the previous night to yell at him about something insignificant, and in their discussion, they realized how much they missed each other, and ended up dating again. She was glowing so radiantly; I didn’t want to ruin it. I didn’t want to hear my name come out of her mouth so many times. I went to my classes, did my work. I walked home along the familiar roads. The cars rushed by, and I wondered if they even noticed me. It was easy for them to go by without stopping to let me cross. I had no choice but to wait for them. Sometimes I would walk without pausing for them to give me an opportunity. I would walk, and every time, the cars would stop in front of the crosswalk. Their headlights looked me down, and annoyed drivers rolled their eyes at my slow pace.
I know that my mother did not try to kill herself. She wasn’t as depressed as she made herself seem. But there’s something inside people, the instinct to avoid danger. And when you start to consider that you might want to die, that reaction disintegrates little by little. My mother, as a car turned sharply at her from around a corner, made no attempt to move as it collided into her and threw her body into the pavement, her blood soaking into the earth.
Completion
You can feel it inside your head.
You don’t even notice the pain because you’re too busy trying to see past the shining orb that has been thrust into your eyes. And you try to turn off the light before you leave the bathroom. Wash your hands. Be reasonable.
Pretend your ears aren’t ringing louder than a jet engine. Notice, as you walk through the hallway – your heart is quickening and your stomach is tightening. Your hand meets the wall to keep you up. Balance long enough to make it to your bedroom.
In your bed, there is safety. You will sleep with just one blanket because sweat is streaming from your body. But just one blanket is enough. You will fall asleep and when you wake up, it will all be done.
But you are not there yet. You are still in the hallway. You think you are close, but the ball of light only lets you see the edges of your vision. The ringing drives deeper between your ears, and it is getting hotter. You are sweating, soaking your shirt so much that you just take it off because you are so close to your room, and nobody is home anyway.
You lean against the wall again and start to wonder if this time, you really are dying. If your last crusade to your bed will never finish, and you will die shirtless in the hall, too blind and deaf to even remember that yesterday, your mother’s eyes pierced into you when she told you that she wished she had never had a daughter. You are too busy trying to feel against the wall the pathway to the certainty of your bed.
And then—
You’re on the hallway floor, shirt in your moist burning hand. Your mother has come home and is asking you Amanda, are you okay.
***
In the evening, I woke up. My body was covered with cooled sweat, and the one blanket did not keep me warm. I had been holding my shirt to me as a slept, and I put it back on. I did not know how long I had been asleep, but my head no longer hurt, and my vision was clear. Had I been dying? I remembered wishing I was dead. It was an embellishment, looking back, a brash decision with no thought of the consequences—a migraine is nothing worth dying for.
But what is?
I wouldn’t die for my mother, or my father, or my best friend. I generally believe in the principle that people should treat everyone else in the way that they themselves would want to be treated. And I wouldn’t want anyone to die for me. To live the rest of my life knowing that I was only around because somebody else died – specifically, died so that I could stay alive – would equate to a life of guilt. Especially since I’m certain I wouldn’t have done the same for them. Unless they think like I do, and were just looking for a way out. If my best friend died for me, everyone would say “Wow, Lindsay is such a hero.” But if Lindsay had wanted to die, I know she wouldn’t commit suicide, because she cares too much about the people around her. She would never want to hurt them – even if they drove her to the point of suicide. So if she saw a bullet, flying at me, she could jump in front of it and fulfill her desire to be dead without looking selfish or like an angsty teen – as we are all doomed to appear, regardless of our motives. Instead, Lindsay is a hero and everyone will look at me and think “I wish Amanda was dead instead of Lindsay.” They will never say that though, instead they will say “You’re so lucky you had such a good friend.” And I will not be courageous enough to tell them that she only did it so that she wouldn’t have to suffer through life anymore, and used me for her own self-exterminating wishes. But Lindsay would never want to die. She is too content.
Lindsay is not as thoughtful as I am.
***
Knockknockknock. Three knocks. My mother was at the door. She opened it before I told her that it was okay to come in. She is much taller than I am, and much fatter too. She stopped paying for my clothes when she realized that the sizes I needed were a third of what she wore.
“You’ve been sleeping for a long time,” she said.
“Yeah, I had another migraine.”
“Hrmph.” She looked at me accusingly, like I did it to myself so that I could sleep all day. She was acting no differently than she did any other day. Maybe she didn’t remember that she told me she wished I hadn’t been born. Maybe she had thought it over so many times that the words became meaningless. “You should stop eating MSG, I heard on the radio that that causes a lot of neurological problems,” she said.
“I don’t think that’s it, Mom.”
“Well watch what you eat anyway. I can tell you’re gaining weight.”
I was not. But fighting her over such trivialities was pointless. She turned to my desk and began fiddling with my collection of old Halloween candy shaped into various monsters. Her thick dry fingers ran over the vampire, the werewolf, the ghost.
“You’re going to your father’s next weekend.”
“I know, Mom. You told me that two days ago.”
She looked sharply at me. “Don’t be a smartass,” she said. “I’m trying to take care of you.”
“Okay, I’m sorry.” I wasn’t sorry. But again, not worth fighting over.
“He has a new girlfriend, did I tell you?” she said much more quickly than she had intended.
“I think you mentioned it.”
“I don’t want you talking to her,” she said, eyes intensifying.
“What?” Even for my mother, that seemed ridiculous.
“I hear she’s a skank, and she used to be a meth addict. Your father could do better than that. You need to spend time with responsible adults, not trash like that.”
“But how can I not talk to her if I’m in the same house as her? When she comes up and says ‘Hi, you must be Amanda,’ I’m supposed to just walk away?”
My mother was getting angry. She pulled at her brown hair, where the gray streaks were starting to grow back in from the last ninety-dollar salon dye job. “You’re smart, figure something out.” She walked toward the door, but turned around before she was out of my room.
“Oh, you need to get up. It’s almost 8, and you should eat something. I don’t feel like cooking tonight.”
***
On Monday, I didn’t go to school. Lindsay had a car, so she picked me up three blocks from my house and drove us to the closest Safeway. We sat in the backseat and ate sandwiches from their deli counter. She paid for all of the food.
She was talking about her ex-boyfriend, spewing out lists of faults in his personality. “Jake never offered to pay for me when we went out. I mean, I wouldn’t have made him pay all the time or anything, but it would’ve been nice every once in a while. That’s what boyfriends are supposed to do, right?”
I nodded. “He was a dick anyway.” That was what she wanted me to say. I did not remind her that three months ago, he was perfect.
“But what did you do this weekend?” Lindsay asked.
“I had another migraine.”
“Oh shit, really? That’s like three in the last month or something.”
“Four.” My migraines were one of the few things I kept count of. “This was the worst though. I couldn’t see anything, and I ended up passing out in my hallway.”
“Wow, god. I’m sorry Amanda.” She referred to me by my name every time she felt like she had something serious to say. It wasn’t often.
“It’s okay, I just got up and went to sleep in my bed for a while, and then I felt fine.” I didn’t tell Lindsay about wanting to die for that one brief period of time between stumbling out of the bathroom and collapsing on the floor. “I heard my mom crying again last night.”
“Over your dad again?”
“I think so. He has this new girlfriend, and my mom got all worked up over it.” She was more than worked up. When she first found out about it, she threw pots across the kitchen, pulled part of her hair out, and shredded a pile of laundry that had been sitting in the living room – clothes that were both hers and mine. She did all this when I was at school, but made no attempt to clear up the evidence before I got home. I cleaned up for her and said nothing. I’m willing to believe that to this day, she still thinks that I don’t know how fake her calm front is.
Lindsay looked concerned, a turkey sandwich clutched between her hands. “Amanda, I’m really sorry that you have to go through all this. If you ever need anything let me know, okay?”
“Yeah, I know. Thanks.” I smiled at her.
“Are we going to go back to school?” she asked. Every time we skipped class, I could tell she felt a little bit uneasy.
“No. Let’s go to the lake.”
“But it’s so cold out!”
“I know. There won’t be anyone there, and we can just walk around. It’ll be an adventure.”
So we went.
***
While I was at the lake, my mother went to the hospital. Lindsay dropped me off at home around the time I would’ve gotten there if I had walked the long journey back from school, and as soon as I got there, I went to sleep. Just as I had began to dream, the phone rang. It was my father, from the intensive care unit.
I walked to the hospital, a little bit longer than my walk to school. I was too mystified to run. My mother was hit by a car? I didn’t even know that she left the house. What was she doing? What kind of car was it? Did the driver stop, or just keep going? Was there blood on the asphalt?
I got to the hospital, and a nurse instructed me to walk to the last room in the hallway to my left. I glanced into all the other rooms with open doors on my way to my mother. The patients were mostly all comatose.
I had never seen so many people so close to death. I had to consider if they were even people at all. You can’t have half of a person. Half of a body, but not a person. You can cut a piece of meat in half, and it’ll still fulfill its duty as meat – there’ll just be less of it. Is a whole person determined by how much of their brain is intact? How many car crashes they’ve been in? How long they can live without being hooked up to a machine? Maybe some people are born incomplete and spent their entire lives never knowing what they’re missing. Half of a whole. Three-fourths. Nine out of ten.
I reached the end of the hall. The last room – my mother. She looked like every other lifeless body in the corridor, its existence confirmed by a machine, every ping reminding us that this was, in fact, still a person. Not just a pile of organs and bones.
My father came out of the room. He was alone, no girlfriend. He hugged me. “Amanda, are you okay? I was worried about you walking here by yourself.”
“Yeah, I’m fine.” I didn’t get hit by a car.
He looked shocked as he gazed at my mother, tubes jammed all over her. “It’s terrible. The doctors have no idea how long she could be like this.”
I looked at her. There was dried blood all over her face and arms, and probably under her blue hospital gown too. My father hesitated as he spoke. “There’s an artery blocked off in her leg. It’s not getting any blood. They… they may have to amputate it.” He covered his mouth like he was horrified with himself for even saying it.
A piece of meat is a whole piece of meat, even if you cut it apart.
***
I went to school the next day. Really went. I didn’t tell Lindsay about my mother. She was too happy. Apparently she had called Jake the previous night to yell at him about something insignificant, and in their discussion, they realized how much they missed each other, and ended up dating again. She was glowing so radiantly; I didn’t want to ruin it. I didn’t want to hear my name come out of her mouth so many times. I went to my classes, did my work. I walked home along the familiar roads. The cars rushed by, and I wondered if they even noticed me. It was easy for them to go by without stopping to let me cross. I had no choice but to wait for them. Sometimes I would walk without pausing for them to give me an opportunity. I would walk, and every time, the cars would stop in front of the crosswalk. Their headlights looked me down, and annoyed drivers rolled their eyes at my slow pace.
I know that my mother did not try to kill herself. She wasn’t as depressed as she made herself seem. But there’s something inside people, the instinct to avoid danger. And when you start to consider that you might want to die, that reaction disintegrates little by little. My mother, as a car turned sharply at her from around a corner, made no attempt to move as it collided into her and threw her body into the pavement, her blood soaking into the earth.
