“Existence”
It was Christmas Day, 2004. My sister, the most enthusiastic five-year-old you’d ever meet, rolled around in the heaps of wrapping and tissue papers, gleefully playing with her new toys. She looked like one of those kids you see in holiday advertising, the kind that loves to distribute hugs and smiles to her family. She had a future in whatever she wanted: she was clever, funny, and adorable, having so many talents we couldn’t even name all of them.
“Saoirse, honey, say cheese!” My mother referred solely to me as she snapped away with the family camera, for Carys couldn’t be grinning more broadly if the dentist was tugging at her mouth with the type of plier tools he used to open her mouth further. I looked up, smiling one of the last true smiles of my existence, thought that was unbeknownst to me. At that point, I thought happiness was in the cards for me. How very wrong I was.
“Okay, Mam and I are going to get more candy,” Mom informed us as they buttoned up their coats and tied their boots. “Saoirse, you’re in charge. If you both behave, you can have your marshmallow Santas when we get back!” That was quite a prospect. In the past, my mothers hadn’t let us eat our marshmallow Santas in any less than three sittings; after all, they were about a foot long and multiple inches wide and deep. They’d been loosening up over the last year, though, because of Mam’s dad’s death in March. She thought about what a terrible parent he’d been, and how she could be so much better to her existing kids. She’d been a great parent before that -- they’d both been -- but death gets you thinking about your life like nothing else.
Carys seemed oblivious to the fact that they were gone, a little too oblivious. She continued to writhe around on the floor, but it wasn’t until a few minutes later that this motion wasn’t her usual playing. No, it was much worse. The coroner described it as one of the most severe seizures he’d ever seen.
My mothers put me in therapy shortly after that, and it worked for a few years. I missed her, but I thought myself to have accepted that she was dead and gone. I was wrong, though. When I was fifteen, I turned to drinking, which lasted about a year before I decided that cutting was a better idea. There was just less pain involved. Sure, there were gashes deep as a small tidepool all over my arms, but they didn’t inhibit my thinking the way that beer had. They didn’t drop my IQ the way the drinks had, from a 155 to a 148. Yes, the scores will still extraordinary, but extraordinary had never been my standard. Nothing short of perfect was my standard, and being responsible for the death of my beloved sister – which I always considered myself to be – represented an imperfection. I couldn’t tolerate that, now, could I? So at seventeen, I decided to follow my therapist’s instructions to enter my sister’s room, which had remained literally untouched for eight years. My parents coped fairly well -- after all, they had each other -- but they couldn’t bear to open that door. That would involve too many painful memories. Both of them been stifling some absolutely horrible memories all their adult lives, so blocking out just a few more years’ worth wasn’t that much of a problem. It was unfortunate, but seemed to be the truth.
I wanted to live peacefully, I wanted to live freely, so I opened that door and stepped through. It was, of course, just as she’d left it on Christmas morning: purple flannel covers strewn all over her bed, her favorite doll set next to her pillow, and a mess of toys on the floor. I cried, hard, when I saw all that. I remembered entering her room that morning, telling her to wake up, for it was finally Christmas! The stream of memories that I usually had of her in my mind developed into a river, raging after a storm, flooding the plain around it and washing away any semblance of sanity that I had left at that point. It’d be all right, I told myself, backing out of the entryway and sneezing, for there’d been an enormous buildup of dust over the years that I’d detected as soon as I’d walked in.
And it was all right, or at least it was for the next few days. When I woke up a week later, though, it was to find a strange woman sitting at the edge of my bed. She was old and wrinkled, but her black and beady eyes were astoundingly astute for her age. She didn’t speak, simply stared into my soul until I tried to fight it. I couldn’t, however: I was completely paralyzed and suddenly found that even my eyes could not move. So I stared back at her, scared to death but unable to do anything about it. I finally woke up for real after about twenty minutes of it and decided that it must have been a nightmare. I later figured out that it was not: it was a hallucination, and I knew that because she visited my weekly – sometimes several times a week – for months afterwards. I didn’t tell a soul, which was mostly because I didn’t have a soul to talk to. Even my therapist was fed crap that I didn’t believe – couldn’t believe – about how I was okay, about how I had friends, about how I was fitting in. It was impossible for me to fit in: I was the girl whose sister had died. There wasn’t much else to say about my school presence. I just followed along, never spoke unless directly prompted to, and stared blankly ahead. My mind had found a way for my face to be rid of emotion shortly after Carys left. It was simply the easiest thing to do at the time, for it got me out of endless interrogations by my teachers, classmates, parents, and relatives.
I told myself that I had no reason to be isolate myself from the world, for my parents had it much worse than me. My mam’s parents kicked her out of their house at sixteen, left to roam the streets in Ireland until her talents were discovered and she was able to make it to America. Mom’s parents made her go to “therapy” meant to make her love men, then told her for years that she was awful for something she couldn’t even control. Even in America, they weren’t able to get married until I was eight, and then it was limited to just one state. They’d been planning a wedding when Carys died, and had to put it off till I was twelve because they just didn’t want to have to deal with the emotional burdens. They weren’t even technically married where we lived. Thinking about their pasts – how strong they’d been; how they’d overcome it all; how they could still smile years later – just made me feel worse about myself. How could I be so selfish to suck all light out of a room upon entering it? It wasn’t fair for anyone else. I was a vortex; a mortiferous symbol of how quickly true life could end. For true life was to be able to live, laugh, love, and see beauty. Existence was purely that; there was no other way to describe it than being living and breathing matter.
So I continued on that path for some years. It was not the exciting ways my classmates had chosen; rather, I’d become a hollow shell. There was nothing on the planet that I desired anymore because I knew that I could not stop the pain, no matter how hard I’d tried. You have to trust that I’d tried, as I had. It was the hardest I had ever tried for anything, ever, and I knew that I could never put more effort into something as long as I remained on that miserable planet.
At some point, I had realized that death could not be so horrible. I, like so many humans, was afraid of my own mortality. I did not know what to expect from death and that was what frightened me about it. Oh, I’d love to be rid of earth, but I didn’t know – couldn’t know – what would lay ahead. Would I float through the abyss for all eternity? That seemed to be the most plausible explanation, except that I simply could not fathom how long all eternity would be. I understood the concept, but it troubled me that I could never think again, for thinking was the sole joy I found in my being. Perhaps I would be able to retain my beloved cerebral cortex while the rest of my body decomposed. Even that would result in thinking being lost at some point, though. Perhaps I’d wind up in a heaven. I hadn’t believed in heaven for as long as I could remember, nor had I believed in a hell. Maybe I was wrong, though. I highly doubted it, but it was always a possibility nagging at my mind.
And so I began to form a plan. It was quite vague, because I never sat down and focused on it. It seemed to be a daydream floating throughout my brain all through each and every day, telling me that I must do something, that I couldn’t go on as the person I was, and soon I began to listen. I made a complete plan. I ensured that it was absolutely fool-proof, then went about executing it – executing myself.
As soon as school let out that day, I ran around the neighborhood as long as I possibly could. Physical exertion as a general rule made me angry, and I figured that I’d feel number having put stress on my muscles. I continued to run until I felt I could run no more. A mad fervor deep in my soul told me I was ready for this moment; that I had been nearly my entire life. Death was simply the next stage in the process. I charged back to the school, which was halfway across town. Why the school? Because school was where I felt the greatest pains. I hated my classmates, truly hated them and all they stood for with nearly all my being. I hated the material, where I was forced to relearn everything I’d learned in prior years and in my free time. Most of all, I hated how little choice I had in everything. It was simply a “do everything I tell you” place, which was exactly the kind of place I always strived to avoid.
I reflected upon the fact that my journey of suffering began at my sister’s death and was about to end at my own. My poor, poor parents.
I barrelled up the stairs, made my way out onto the third floor roof, and jumped. A dull thud was heard and then I could think no more.
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