SUPPRESSION •Complete•

A DATE TO REMEMBER

A DATE TO REMEMBER

You know when there is a hurricane warning. You always get warned before it hits so you can guard yourself, provide some sort of protection. You never get warned when your whole life gets torn apart and crumbles to the ground around you. Sometimes it's a phone call in the night, maybe you stumble into the wrong room, perhaps you take the wrong turn, and just maybe you're in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Evelyn accidentally went into her mother's hospital room when she died. She went into cardiac arrest, an alarm sounded and doctors and nurses rushed in, pushing Evelyn out of the room. She watched her mother die.

Lola's mother was having a normal day doing something for her daughter when she crossed the street on a slippery day and a car killed her on impact. No one told her that a car was going to spin out on the road, hit her, and that she would be dead before she hit the ground.

Kate didn't realize she turned into a oneway street, she didn't see the sign. She took a mere wrong turn had a small head on collision with a car and right there and then in the driver's seat she lost her child. She miscarried and now she'll live with the guilt of knowing it was her fault her little girl died.

Sometimes the phone rings in the middle of the night and someone happens to be awake to answer it. I listened to mom answer, I heard the soft murmuring, too quiet too understand. Then there was a crash as the phone hit the ground. Dad woke up, he found mom on the floor crying. I knew in the pit of my stomach something was wrong and I knew I didn't want to know what it was.

Because if no one says it, if you can't hear it, then it's not real. But it'll come out, it'll find you, and you'll be forced to say it, forced to hear it.

I'll remember the 20th of May for the rest of my life.

Evelyn will remember the 6th of January for the rest of her life.

Lola will remember the 29th of November for the rest of her life.

Kate will remember the 16th of April for the rest of her life.

Those dates don't have any importance, they're just regular dates that come and pass every year. But to Evelyn, to Lola, to Kate, to me, those individual dates mean something. Because on those days, we lost someone.

Evelyn may have fought with her mom a lot. It didn't hurt any less that she died. Lola may have been too young too really remember her mother. That doesn't fix that empty whole in her chest. Kate may have never met her little girl. That didn't make her any less real. I may have shoved those memories away, I may have ignored her, blocked her out, that doesn't change the guilt, the hollow feeling inside.

Twentieth of May, 2015, Ainsley Barnett committed suicide fifteen days before her fifteenth birthday.