Fading in the Present

These days I find myself drifting into memories of my childhood.
I think of the way we used to fight for our places in our classrooms, claiming them ours as though that part of the world belonged to us, our names etched in the corner of our desks and carved in the walls of the hallways, marking our presence.
The way our voices raced to climb each other's until we felt like we were heard.

The way we crashed and burned and laughed our days away.

The way we left parts of ourselves everywhere we went, burying them under the earth for someone to find when we are gone.

And the way the mountains echoed back our names when we shouted them in the dark.

Of a Girl Even You Couldn't Break

The first time you saw her, you could only think about how you would like to lock her smile somewhere only you could see it. How you envied the wind carrying her laughter to the parts of the world unknown to you. How you wanted to narrow the world down to the walls of your house where  it would echo around every corner and fill all the abandoned spaces. And like a child who was never taught to hear "no", you could not let her drift away, could not leave her alone.

A Girl Who Could Never Be Brave Enough | Fragments from the Diary of a Lost Girl

September 16, 2017

Dear diary,

I was never a brave girl. When I was six, I fell down the stairs of my school and hurt my head. There were no serious injuries but I still ran home crying and screamed and screamed for my father until he enclosed me in his arms, whispering soothing words all the while. When I was eleven, I fell while trying to skate. With scratched elbows, bleeding knees, shaking body and barely contained sobs, I reached home. Swallowed my tears, tried to put on a brave facade and told my father in a high pitched, wobbly voice that I was okay, I was okay, I was okay. I think those words for me just as much as they were for my father who was staring at me with something like sympathy in his eyes. Eyes that could see through me. Eyes that made me feel fragile, breakable, weak when all I wanted was for him to say, "Yes, my baby girl. It's all okay. Look how brave you've become!".

You Are Meant To Light Up Your Darkness

On sleepless nights, you try to remember when you began feeling like this. You go as far back into your memories as you could, trying to determine where it all started out. But there was no starting point, no sudden creeping of this feeling that dragged you down as you grew up. Because even when you were young, you knew how sadness felt like, didn’t you? Apologies on your lips, eyes somewhere far away, despair slipping in the cracks of your skin while your heart beat in an unforgivable staccato rhythm, drenched in misery, quietly sinking into the familiar darkness. You close your eyes and you remember those school days: sitting in the back corner of your class, tracing the holes in the desk and daydreaming about an alternate universe where the loneliness doesn’t follow you to your bed or slip into your dreams; holding your breath under water, lungs burning, your body straining to come up for air while a part of you longed to stay there, wondering how drowning feels like.

A Story Drenched in Grief | The Five Stages of Andrew Brawley by Shaun David Hutchinson

Title: The Five Stages of Andrew Brawley.
Author:  Shaun David Hutchinson.
Rating: 4.5 of

This is the second book I've read that is set up in a hospital. The first one was Unborn by Rose Christo and while it was just as depressing and dark(what else can you expect from a book that's set up entirely in a hospital?), there were plenty of light, funny moments that lift up your spirits and you sort of forget in those moments that some of the characters are actually on the edge of their lives and are barely surviving, and you find yourself smiling while your heart is breaking and your mind is still reeling from the horror of the characters' backstories. It is something I admire about Rose Christo a lot because not everyone can pull off that kind of humor in a setting where the characters are surrounded by death and grief. The Five Stages of Andrew Brawley, on the other hand, is so heavy and filled to the brink with Drew's guilt and misery that the emotions almost press down on you like some kind of weight on your shoulders. They are so palpable, so tangible, your heart clenches in agony in response to Drew's pain. The fact that the book had that kind of impact on me says a lot about Shaun Hutchinson's writing. It's beautiful, but not in the way I find Melina Marchetta's or Charlotte McConaghy's writing beautiful; the kind that makes my breath hitch by the sheer beauty of words or the kind where my eyes roam again and again over the words until I feel like I have memorized them. No. Shaun Hutchinson's writing is beautiful in a melancholic way. It has a distinct mournful quality to it. The kind that makes you cry and you don't even realise you are crying until you taste the salt of your tears on your lips.

The Love of Forgetting

I remember our last time together.
Your arms around my waist, your face buried in my hair, your voice, whispering, again and again, "Why couldn't it work out? How did we fall apart?"
My fingers digging in your shoulders, as though they didn't care about the "why's" and "how's", as though they couldn't bear to let go. But my heart had already let go of you.