She's Gone

Numb

It's chapter one, eek. SO this is real now.  Please be warned trigger warning ahead. Read at your own risk.

This amazing trailer was done by holliehannah she is an amazingly talented author and editor so check her out.

Anyway on with the chapter.

The phone call came on a Thursday at 2pm. It wasn't like I saw on TV or what I read about in magazines. On the other end, an aunt. Not a hospital or her grieving parents just a random aunt. I had never met her but she was doing the rounds. She was brief and clinical about it before it dawned on her, she asked to speak to a parent. She couldn't undo what she had done. I was 17 on Thursday 14th April at 2pm, the day she told me my best friend was dead.

Numb. I felt nothing. Maybe I still needed time to process it, I don't know, but the numbness is what I remembered. No feeling. No emotions. No stages of grief. Nothing but plain emptiness inside of me. I was paralysed with shock. Frozen in the moment. She was really gone.

Suicide. That's what they whispered, I didn't listen. I knew what they said held some truth in it but how could it be my best friend that committed suicide when she stopped living months ago?

No one else knew. Not my friends or my school or even my parents. They were calling us in alphabetical order. That made me first, the benefit of being called Alice. Apparently that benefit was sitting, waiting whilst my other friends had yet to experience the same heartbreak. I was grieving alone whilst they were oblivious. I wanted it to stay that way for them. I wanted them stuck in the moment of happiness before it all came crumbling down. It was too late for me but maybe they could be saved.

I was vaguely aware of my mum attempting to comfort me. Yet no soft words or hugs could bring back the dead. My world was spiralling out of control into an abyss of madness. Suicide. Grief. Pain. Dead. Sophie. Gone. Hurt. Cool arms wrapped around me grounding me back to the moment. Mum. She was both a desired blessing and horrid curse. I was overwhelmed by the scent of vanilla, the perfume she had always worn. Ever since I was a small baby the scent had been part of my mum.

Then I cried. I sobbed. I broke into a thousand pieces in my mum's arms. And they tightened around me, holding together the mess I was.

The days that followed merged together. Each day ran into the next. Each morning I had to wake up and remind myself. It was continuous task to make sure I didn't forget. I wouldn't allow myself to forget. I was worn out each evening from doing nothing. Every moment was a struggle to break through the waves of grief and power on back to shore. Grieving took all the energy out of me, so I slept, a lot. Sleeping was good, whilst the pain didn't end I wasn't aware it was there.