MARIGOLD |H.S. AU|

CHAPTER THIRTY

I love you all

Life isn't kind.

Life is hard, and it's messy and it's lonely.

Sometimes it feels like a game, a game which no one has given you the rules for, a game that you aren't smart enough, or rich enough, or old enough to play. The handbook kept a secret, the players with faces blurred, you're completely in the dark and unimportant, drifting through, trying to keep up.

Ultimately, it's a game to see how long you can last until you're all alone, trudging in water, trying to stay afloat, trying to find reasons to stay afloat, reasons to fight for every second when it feels like a challenge you might as well give up. The feeling of someone pulling your feet further under, looking for reasons to keep fighting.

I've never been one to believe in the afterlife, religion never forced on me, something that I've never had a reason to believe in it. But when loss hits you square in the face, it's difficult to try and comprehend nothingness. Nothingness is the conclusion for someone who you see so clearly, despite them being gone.

That someone who is so vivid in your mind, is just gone. The idea that they're no longer a person, they're just a memory. A memory that can behold so much emotion, love and passion. So much anger and confusion.

That's what nobody tells you about grief. There's this period where you feel an overwhelming sense of anger, and it can affect you in so many different ways. This anger demands to be felt, it oozes through every aspect of your personality, infiltrating until it takes over your body. Pure anger and rage.

But I'm angry at her, even though I know it's not her fault, I'm just so fucking angry at her.

The way she let this happen, and now she's just gone. She isn't my Mum anymore, and I don't even know why, why did she leave me?

I was never prepared for the day where I would finally have an answer, a sense of closure. I say I was prepared for this news, despite the fact I expected it at some point. I knew she was dead, I knew she had to be, but I mostly believed that because it was easier to cope with rather than believing that she chose to left me. I thought it would be easier than seeing her again, and having to ask her where she's been, why she left me behind. But it isn't.

It's never easy to hear that the person you missed most in the world is gone, and they've been gone this whole time.

She was strong, so fucking strong. And something like this was never supposed to happen to her, she never thought it would, but it did, and I didn't even know. This whole time I've been so ignorant to the fact that if she was dead, she was just lying somewhere, waiting to be found. The fact I continued with my life as normal, while she was calling out desperately for someone to find her, makes me feel ill, and I'll never, ever forgive myself for that.

I said I thought she was dead, but there would always be a part of me that secretly hoped she was living out in Italy somewhere, in a huge villa, ghost designing like she always wanted.

But life is never that kind.

This is a pain that feels never ending, and I can't feel it ever becoming a dull ache like everybody says, or a feeling I'm able to overpower, it just doesn't feel like that will ever be the case. This pain is a scream that feels like it will never stop, the sound never dying out, a reality tainted with a nightmare.

Every time I blink, I breathe, I pick up a piece of clothing, it's tainted by the fact she isn't here to wear it. Someone took that choice away from her, for no reason whatsoever. And because of that, my Father is without his wife, and I'm without my Mother.