Accolade

chapitre trente-huit

Every effort was met with no response. Her skin was as white as the sheets beneath her. I watched, hoping to see her eyelids flutter or her chest rise, but neither happened. Limp, her hands were limp at her sides. My brain refused to believe that this was happening, something this traumatizing could not be processed. I would probably never process it. This would live in my head every time I closed my eyes. 

Minutes passed. 

Again and again and again. 

Slowly, the doctors looked at each other. They glanced at the clock. Panic rose within in me, strangling the breath from my crippled lungs. 

No.

I couldn't hear it. 

I wouldn't hear those words. 

I didn't look at my older brothers. I couldn't see the devastation on their faces either. I fled the room. Everything was blurry and I didn't feel like I was in my own body, everything felt out of touch around me and I was drifting. Slipping. My feet moved on their own accord, somehow listening to my own heart wailing. 

Something had lurched to live within me, taking a home in the marrow of my bones, and it was a feeling that consumed everything like wildfire over dry bones. A feeling that could only be  fueled by pain and agony and suffering. It only presented itself when my heart stopped beating for the breath of a second, unsure if it had the strength to continue.

That's what hurt. 

Deep within my chest, beneath the brittle ribs that caged it, my heart hurt. Somehow, it knew what I refused to admit. That little organ was reacting to the outside world as if it had a conscience of its own---as if it had grown horribly attached to the people it knew and knew when they weren't close anymore. There was an invisible thread that held close to others, breaking when lost. 

My heart ached because she was gone.

She was gone. 

I crashed through a set of doors, unsteady on my feet, my hands on the wall. I didn't know where I was going but the heartache grew and grew until I could hardly breathe. My head felt fuzzy from the lack of oxygen, I was starving for air and yet that blessed reprieve seemed worth it if I could escape this agony.

This organ composed of tissue and muscle and blood had the capability to kill me, and sometimes it chose the path that hurt the most. My throat tightened until only gasping sobs could fill my ringing ears. My vision was blurring, I was on the verge of passing out. I had tripped down the stairs and then found myself collapsing. 

I gave up.

In the stairwell of the hospital, I sobbed. 

I wasn't just a man mourning the sudden loss of his little sister. I was that teenage boy who didn't have a clue how to navigate the world without his mother. I was the boy who hadn't felt a connection with his siblings because they were perfect and he was flawed. I was the eighteen year old who showed up in Miami with a gaping hole in his heart and thirty dollars in his jean pocket. 

I buried my face in my hands and I couldn't stop the heaving cries that threatened to crack my ribs and let my bruised heart crawl to its death in the world. I knew that this pain wouldn't go away, it wouldn't leave. It would stay until it gobbled up the rest of my hope, my will to live when everyone I loved was taken. When I watched them leave and nothing I could do would stop them.

I knew this pain. I felt it when Mom died. 

But to have it happen again? To watch my little sister struggle? 

For her heart to stop?

Fuck cancer. 

Fuck this stupid world. 

Fuck living.

I didn't care what anyone said. When the people closest to you die, a piece of you dies with them. Like a connection that is severed so horribly, it scars the gentle strings of your beating organ. It doesn't matter how hard you try to hold on, no matter how much you cut yourself trying to keep it together, there's nothing that you can do to stop any of it. 

It just doesn't matter. 

Bad things happen anyway, and they happen again, and again, and again. Good people get the worst deck of cards dealt to them. Bad people get opportunities they don't deserve. People just come and go beneath the moon and stars, whether they matter or whether their existence is just a blink for the sun. People come into your life and make you love them and then they leave.

Except, pain can only hurt so much. Loss can only empty you. Grief can only consume you. There can be a battle going on within your body, and nobody knows. Nobody will know how much your heart aches, how much you struggle to breathe, how little you believe there is truly happiness in the world. 

Had she become a star in the night sky? 

Suddenly, there was nothing within me at all. Everything that had welled up inside me was gone. I didn't feel like crying. I didn't feel like my heart had broken in my chest. I didn't feel. 

I was staring at the wall when Auden found me. I was impassive as I glanced up at my older brother when he laid a hand on my shoulder. There were tears in his eyes but they weren't bitter. Something akin to light lived in his. Hope. Then, he told me why he wasn't as broken as I was.

"She has a heartbeat. They saved her." 

My own heart stopped. 

☼ ☼ ☼

Your broken hearts were heard.

But that doesn't mean we're out of the line of fire. Not yet.