The Potato Nation

16: Why

It’s always the same after she cries. Red circles under her eyes. Red nose. Red eyes. Everything red, red, red as if everything is bleeding, bleeding with her, with her heart, as if everything has been cut.

She shouldn’t be bleeding, though because how stupid is that, bleeding over a mistake when she should be learning from it but the tears come and go and she can’t even stop them anymore.

When she gets back in her bed, she snugly hides under her blanket and then takes her phone in her hand.

Stares at it.

Goes through her contacts.

And then, she realizes that she has no one to talk to, that if she did talk to Farhanna or Zaid or anyone else, they’d just end up telling her that she’s stupid, an idiot, an over-reactor, someone who doesn’t even have a story to back her fricking tears up.

She wouldn’t even blame them if they did because that is what she thinks too – that she’s weird and stupid and she just doesn’t belong here, in this world of normal people who cry at normal things.

She starts crying once again and she swears that it is the worst feeling ever because it’s night and she’s alone, so fricking alone and there, in the other room, her parents are watching dramas together, enjoying, laughing while she, she is crying and weeping and she wants to stop, oh my God, she wants to stop.

She doesn’t.

They go on and on, these tears. They trail down her cheek, down to her neck and she wants to just stop breathing in the moment but she’s afraid, too afraid to die.

If she dies, she faces God and she isn’t ready for that, she hasn’t prepared for that and Ya Allah, she doesn’t even know where her thoughts are heading or where her tears are leading her.

And then she thinks, why her, why her, why not somebody else, why not nobody and she’s dying and crying and screaming except that she isn’t screaming and she isn’t dying – they are all in her head.

There are tears, sure, but these screams – they exist only in her head. They are silent and they shout at her to stop, stop destroying herself, stop being a fricking mental patient.

She can’t stop.

Can’t.

SHE CAN’T.

Why? She screams in her mind, at it, why don’t you shut up? Why don’t you stop thinking so much for once? Why do you always keep overreacting?

But she doesn’t get an answer, she never does.

And so there she is, lying in her bed, shivering, screaming at her mind, weeping, trying to stop, trying to die, trying not to die, trying to live, trying not to live, trying to somehow, change herself, trying not to think, trying to get answers, just trying, trying, trying.

You know what, though?

She fails each time.

.

The first thing Emma notices when she enters the house is the ridiculously strong smell of cigarette. The next thing she sees is her father, with his bloodshot eyes, lying on the floor, taking drags of the cigarette.

“Mom?” She shouts, her voice wavering.

Her father looks at her. His face is tear-stained.

His smile is strained, “Hello, dear.”