Papering Over The Cracks

Prologue

I was ten when my mother committed suicide. It was one of those times when the shock of something hits you so hard that everything becomes a big, surreal blur and you lose the ability to sort out what is real and what isn’t. Sometimes I see it as a good thing that she died when I was young – too young to fully understand the pain of losing someone so dear; young enough to get used to life without her. But mostly, I just feel as though I was horribly robbed.

I live each day with a heavy burden weighing down on me – pained to remember her, yet terrified to forget. An impossible battle, lost before it had a chance to begin. And yet still it plays out before me, every waking moment (and most non-waking moments too), the casualties astronomical. I’m still not sure what those casualties represent. Maybe my dying sanity.

I try to be optimistic.

I really do. I try to be strong, to be happy, to keep smiling and live each day as it comes and all that crap. I think people believe it. I hope that’s the case. Because I don’t want sympathy, or pity, or warm hugs from people who say they understand but really they don’t, who cry for my pain when they can’t possibly feel what I feel. So I hide behind my mask of sanguinity, trying desperately to make it my face. Because that is what I choose to do.

I believe it is our choices which make us who we are. I often wonder whether things might have turned out in another way had I chosen differently. They certainly would have if my mother made different decisions. But then again, I wonder a lot of things – like why is the sky blue and where do people go when they die and is God real and why did the process of cell replication have to be called Mitosis and not something more interesting.

But that’s just me.