I posted this because it will be awhile before I can post chapters from my other stories :)
Beware: this is kind of depressing.
It’s raining outside.
It’s a light rain and it makes a small mist rise from the ground. Today’s weather matches my mood - colorless and sad. I walk outside, feeling the cooler air meet my face for the first time in a week. The green trees and bushes sway in the wind, bending the direction the gust is blowing them in, and their bodies groan under the stress. There’s a slight limp to my walk, as I stumble out of our SUV, and over to the graveyard.
The cemetery is located about seven miles from our house. It was made recently, so there are only around one hundred bodies or so buried here. The various colors from the flowers by the graves greet me, and the tombstones make my blood freeze like ice. Mattie’s body is here. I don’t think it had hit me until now.
“Can I go by myself?” I asked my mom, when she preceded to go with me. She gave me an expression of uncertainty, and I notice how her gaze rests on my leg.
“I’ll be fine,” I tell her. “And I kind of want to do this alone.”
The rain is sinking into my scalp, through my clothes, and I feel chills run through my arms.
“Okay,” she finally says. “But at least take this with you.” She hands me an umbrella. I take it and raise it above my head. It’s like turning a light switch off, that quick movement, when I feel the rain and then suddenly I don’t.
“Her tombstone is over there,” she says, pointing to my right. “She’s in the fourth row.” I nod and start trudging through the grass, up the hill.
I can feel the wetness soaking into my socks. My toes squirm inside my damp shoes. I’d never like the feeling of water being trapped inside my shoes. It always made me cringe.
I wore my black coat - which was long – it easily went down to my knees. I wrapped the unbuttoned flaps closer to my chest, because I was walking in the direction of the wind. Little raindrops fell on my face, like the gentle tears of God. Was he crying with me?
I reach the top of the hill, where I approach the rows of tombstones. It didn’t seem real to me, that people’s bodies were below my feet, that they were decaying slowly in their caskets. Unfamiliar names blur by me, until I finally give myself the courage to walk down the fourth row.
I merely glance at the names carved into stone. I recognize a name from my school, though it wasn’t Mattie’s.
SARAH KAY THOMPSON.
September 19, 1995 March 13, 2013.
YOU WILL ALWAYS BE MISSED.
There is a picture of her lying next to her grave (soaked from the rain). I notice that someone had pinned it to the ground so that it wouldn’t blow away. I recognize her face immediately. She had been in my study hall once for a semester. I recognize her long, perfectly straight auburn hair, the light brown eyes, and the splash of freckles on her face.
It was like yesterday.
I touch the head of the tombstone with my bare fingers, feeling the cold dampness of the stone absorb into my system. She was dead. Dead. How could that word even seem real to me, after it had affected me so much?
They weren’t coming back.
“What’s your story?” I whisper to the grave. “Who shot you? Where were you at?” I bit my lip, and move on before the pain settled in.
Next to her grave was Mattie’s.
I slowly advanced towards it, and at first I didn’t say anything. I just stare at her name, carved into stone. I can’t bring myself to face the truth. That I really wasn’t going to see her again. That I wouldn’t hear her soft voice or hear her quiet breathing whenever she stood next to me.
“Mattie?” my voice croaks, as my eyes rested on her picture. It was like Sarah’s picture – pinned into the ground. I recognize her face so well that it tore a hole in my heart to know that I wouldn’t be able to speak to it again. I feel the immense despair settle into my chest, weighing me down, as if my insides were made of concrete.
Here she was – or her body at least – in the ground below my feet. I’d never thought I would have to live this day, the day my sister was dead and I was alive. Why did it have to come so soon?
“Mattie.”
I feel my legs sink – a sharp pain expands through my thigh – and it helped contribute to the already growing tears. I sank onto my knees, the umbrella fell from my hands, the rain started pouring heavier, pounding into my body. I ignore the stabbing pains from my gunshot wounds, and I focus more on the growing one inside of me.
“Mattie,” I said, feeling the sobs enter my chest. I clutch at the grass above her body, intertwined it in my fingers, tangling them in the long blades. “Oh, Mattie.”
I start crying, fiercely and persistently. The hot tears run down my cheeks as the wetness of the ground beneath my legs soaks into my jeans. I feel as though my whole being is breaking and shaking. I detect the feeling leave my legs as my weight keeps the blood from flowing through them, I feel my head fall into my hands.
“Mattie,” I say, her name echoing inside my head. “Mattie.”
I didn’t know what happened to her that day, who killed her, where she was shot. I just know that she died in a biology classroom. Was Alec – the person who shot me – the one who took her life away? Did she die before I was attacked or after? Was she in pain? Did she die a slow death?
“Mattie!” I cry, saying her name louder and louder. “Mattie!”
I didn’t know what I expect to get from my actions. Surely, she would never answer me. Surely, it won’t ease the pain. But I found that once I started saying her name, I couldn’t stop. I somehow wanted to make her come back. I somehow wanted to wake up from this dying picture of front of me. I want to wake up, and find her in her room, and sigh with relief to know that she wasn’t dead after all.
But it didn’t work. It never worked. Because this isn’t a dream.
I found that I was ripping the grass as I was thinking harder. I stopped, looking at the handfuls of freshly pulled grass in my palms, and I let go of it slowly. They fall down slowly, sprinkling from my hands, a few blades sticking to my palm. The rain helps wash those exceptional few away.
“I’m so sorry,” I whisper, once I had the breath to say something. “I’m so sorry that you died…and I lived.”
I stroke the moist dirt with my hands, where her head should be beneath me. Though I am so close, I still feel so far away from her. I don’t even know if she is listening to me. I don’t know if she could. I stay there and cry anyways.
I look at the little things people have placed at her grave. A clay kitten that she had carved in seventh grade. She had made it when she was young, but it was flawless nonetheless. She always made things that way, though. Everything had to be perfect.
One of her colorful belts, with splattered paint covering the boring black color beneath it. Mattie had made it by herself.
“It was so dull before,” she had said. “I couldn’t help but spice it up a bit, add some color. It needed that extra boost to feel wanted.”
I am startled by how clearly I can hear her feminine voice. It was still light and girly, but it was hers. It was different, unique, special.
“Oh Halle,” she had told me once. “You think way to hard about things. Try focusing on the simplest things, and the complicated junk melts away.”
I can’t remember why she was telling me that, but I do recount those words. She thought simply, even though she was incredibly smart. She had a different view. I had always wondered what lurked behind those wide blue eyes.
I lift a picture frame of her and her best friend, Carrie at the mall. Both were wearing new shades that they had bought, and both of them wore pink – their classic color. I recognize the handbag Mattie was holding, the one she would take with her everywhere. It was white with random splotches of black and bright green and orange scattered all over it.
The picture frame said: “Love is stronger than death even though it can't stop death from happening, but no matter how hard death tries it can't separate people from love. It can't take away our memories either. In the end, life is stronger than death.”
I look at a few other things she had – perfectly whole shells she had found on a beach that we visited when I was nine (she was seven), a necklace with heart and peace sign charms on it, her bright yellow scrunchie, one of her pink converse shoes, and a beanie baby that she had for as long as I could remember.
Items. Memories.
I reposition myself, trying to think of the best words to say. My goodbye was on the edge of my lips, but I didn’t want to spit it out.
“You were such a good sister to me,” I tell her, looking up at her name. “You didn’t deserve this,” I say, shaking my head. “You didn’t deserve this at all.”
I was able to stop myself from crying (at least really hard) for a moment as I thought about what I want to say next.
“I admit, it’s hard to find words to…” I pause a minute. “To say my goodbye.”
I swallow hard. The rain continues to pound into me, into the earth beneath my knees, into my back, but I remain crouched forward, ignoring all of it.
“I never ever imagined having to do this,” I tell her. “I really wish this day had never come. So badly.”
I take my soaked palm and try to wipe my tears off my cheeks. However, since my hands as just as wet as my face, it doesn’t work out so well. I pretty much just slosh it around in a different position.
“It’s hard to accept that you’re really gone. Even though I was there, in that same building with you, probably experiencing a lot of the things you did before you died, it still doesn’t seem real to me. At least, not as real as I would think it should be.”
I close my mouth. I am rambling on and on. But Mattie wouldn’t have minded. At least she wouldn’t have if she were alive. She was a listener, one of the best things about her. She listened to you. She cared.
“You have no idea how much I’m going to miss you,” I say. “My life isn’t ever going to be complete – it never will be.” My lower lip trembles as I tried to say my last words.
“I love you.”
There they are again, those same warm tears. They were something I was so used to now, constantly making my cheeks chapped, constantly coming to me whenever I needed them – every day.
“Goodbye, Mattie.”
I lay my head down into the wet earth, and breathe deeply. That ache, that sheer loss enters my body, stronger than before. The desolation, the consciousness that this was actually happening to me, the hopelessness in knowing that she would never come back, makes me collapse, unmoving, completely in the ground.
I can’t move, I can’t feel, I can’t cry. I just want to die. I want to be where Mattie is, embrace her tightly, hear her warm chuckle in my ear, and feel her long arms around me. But I never will. I will never experience that ever again. She was gone.
And so am I.
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