dozeofftome

Sometimes I wonder if you're out there still, up, out of your wheelchair, high on life instead of morphine, and basking in the glory of survival. Sometimes I hope that you'll come back. Walking up to our door, returning to tell us your tales, you'd once again use your long-forgotten voice. Sometimes I cry in my sleep, waking in the night, and realizing that I was to blame. I needed forgiveness; you gave me none. Sometimes I get headaches, then take a pill or two. I swallow them whole, without water. I'm used to that by now.

It's starts out with shock. "She's dead." What? Oh, my God, what? Dad's face is red and he's always so sweaty that at first you don't realize those are teardrops on his face. Then there's the disbelief, and you're barely aware when you fall to the ground. You don't hear the choked screams that come out of your mouth. "No. No!" Next is realization. God, they aren't kidding. You feel warm liquid on your knee and realize the gravel that you hit with such force has cut you. Somewhere inside you, you wish that you were dead. Your mom picks you up from the rocks, and then comes grief. She's crying. She's been crying for a long time. She gurgles

If I had a nickel for every time you blew me off in front of your friends, I'd have a lot of money in a child's opinion. I could buy two or three packs of that strawberry Pocky that you like so much, and you'd probably convince me to give a pack to you. I could buy a pack of cigarettes and not smoke them because I made you a promise and I intend to keep it. I could pay for two movie tickets at your favorite theater, and in the end, you'd be the one to go with me. My point is, you're my best friend, even though you never apologize, or pay me back the money you borrow, or read the books I suggest until one of your friends suggests it

There was something different in the air that day. Arrogance? Anger? Smoke? It was smoke from the field burning that always caused my best friend's asthma to act up. I watched the black smoke rise into the air and disappear. Soon, they would outlaw this method, but that hadn't happened yet, so my asthmatic friend was out there somewhere, probably coughing her glasses off of her big, round nose. And I was glad.

Two days after you went to the hospital and died, I walked into your room as I came home from school, and I said hello to it. I told it that I was sorry for its loss. I told it that it shouldn't worry though because I would keep it nice and water the plants while you were gone. They were dead pretty damn fast.

"He left," my mother said, wiping from her pants a small piece of fuzz that had fallen from her dark green sweater. She had no expression on her round face, and she wouldn't meet my eye, instead looking at her hands folded neatly in her lap. After a few seconds of silence, she looked up at me, maybe to see if I was even still there. I was so shocked that I had stopped breathing, or even making any noise at all. "What?" she asked, squinting in a weird way like she and I always had when we were confused. "What... he just...," I choked out. "Left, yeah." She looked at her hands again, pursing her capricious lips, colored a purplish shade of re

Dust and cobwebs decorate your old room. Everything stayed the same, even after we knew that you were never, ever coming back. Nothing has changed; your Lifehouse posters still hang on the rotting walls and your clothes sway eerily on their hangers, keeping the moths and our superstitious sister away. If I didn't know any better, I'd think that you'd wanted it to be like this. You wouldn't want a thing to change after you were gone. Not one thing. Too bad that your leaving was the one thing that caused everything else to change.

We spun around a few times, and then the world was a blur. I couldn't think about anything, but I remember the feeling of when you held my hand. It was loose, but I could feel your grip. That, and the grass between my toes, helped me regain my conscience. And when you fell down, I fell down, staining my pants with mud and ruining another piece of cloth, just so I could stay with you.

Shadows on the wall come alive and they tell me to run away "From what?" I ask them in my dinky way but they don't answer me They blend back into the cimmerian walls or get into the cars passing by on them I wonder what they could've meant and in the morning it's as if they were a dream