No Longer Broken

My heart hurts with heavy awkward pain that comes from remembering why you should be sad after you forgot for a moment or were distracted.

I was distracted for ten years- caught up in moving on by finding ways to believe I couldn’t lose the people I loved again.  Ten years ago today, the girl whom I barely knew who  I was without, walked away for Winter Break and never came back.  Mora was like my shadow- entwined with who I was- just as I was hers. When she left me, for the first time since I knew what it meant, I was alone.

Mora’s death shattered my five-year-old innocence about the world. It was easier to avoid thinking about it so I wasn’t feeling like everything I believed had been transformed into lies. The suffocation of denial was worth the bittersweet relief that numbed my pain. No matter how many barriers I put up to block the knowledge that losing her hurt me deeply- it still did. The fires of built up anger still sent my heart racing and stole away my rational thoughts. Best friends were inseparable- people who couldn’t describe themselves without each other. That was my belief system, my five year old understanding of right and wrong. The scars created by being left behind bled frozen crystal tears that always fell but never shattered on the ground.

I’m sitting here on my bed wanting there to be a way to break down the barriers trapping my soul in this in-between place. I’m holding my knees to my chest hoping that if I stay tight, the unshed tears blurring my eyes won’t make me vulnerable. My hair is sticky from the heat seeping in through the doors despite the fan spinning above my head.

My eyes stare at the sheets avoiding Eve’s glance, my best friend  of the past few years, who is lying on the bed next to me instead of relaxing outside in the Hawaiian heat. I start to write and words of anger and betrayal create a poem full of feelings. I feel the eyes of the girl who has been through everything with me. Eve neither  asks me to talk to her or nor does she assure me ‘Its going to be alright’.

Crying would siphon the sorrow poisoning my bloodstream but it would also force me to face the realities I’d avoided. Whispers in my mind remind me that if I let myself fall apart I’d be giving up on Mora- losing any chance that I could be good enough for her to come back. I’d lose her forever. Reason flows through my mind overcoming my anger towards her for disappearing from my life. Words couldn’t voice the ache my heart felt knowing I’d never get to say goodbye.

“If I hadn’t been mad at her before Winter break. If I had guessed or known. She would still be alive,” my cracked voice threw to the whirring of the fan though Eve still heard it. She looked up at me expectantly.

“Jor, there was nothing you could have done differently to change what happened.  You were five and you weren’t there when she died.” She wasn’t going to force me to talk to her but she wasn’t going to let me feel guilty for events I couldn’t have stopped.

My soul is about to become jagged grief as raindrops stain my cheeks with wet sorrow. The reality that had taken ten years to be absorbed into my heart, was soaking into my skin - she wasn’t coming back. My head against the pillow, laying on my stomach, a surge of tears wash away the feelings of not being good enough. My memories are still there- complete, and no longer blurred. It’s the end of the wait before rain clouds break open and let the warm relief fall down your face.

For so long I had been refusing to cry over someone who wasn’t coming back and whose return I had been waiting for. Being best friends was more real to me than God or Adonai. I “believed” in them too, but God didn’t play house with you during recess, and she [God] definitely didn’t chase you around the playground only to fall down laughing hysterically. I believed in us but I forgot to believe in me. I needed to forgive myself in order to heal from losing her or I would lose myself too.  I couldn’t forgive her because in my five year old mind , I didn’t know how to comprehend that kind of tragedy. Forgiving shattered my frozen tears - fragments of grief scattered to all sides repelled by the way my heart and soul began to heal. I had been holding on to the memory of her absence in anger.  Now I could accept it and start the process of forgiving her and myself.