If I Stay✔️

58

Z A C

Sometimes, I hated my parents for leaving me.

It wasn't a feeling I felt often, but it was often enough for the guilt to wrap around my heart and squeeze it in vice-like grip. I didn't want to hate them, I knew it wasn't their fault for dying — for being murdered. But still, I couldn't shake these overwhelming emotions of sadness, anger, blame and fear.

Emotions directed to no one other than them.

What if they hadn't left the house that day? What if Lily wasn't sick? What if Dad had just locked the car doors from the inside? Would things have been different? Or would fate have a way of catching up and taking them from me anyway — from us.

Was their death just the catalyst for everything wrong that's happened in our lives, for this endless stream of devastation that's cursed us every day since they left?

Lily's kidnapping and abuse. Leo's depression, substance abuse and the assaults. Ace's crippling anxiety. Grey's uncontrollable anger. Callan and Alex growing up much quicker than they needed to. Carter and Kaden using their humour as a blanket to crawl under when their feelings became too overwhelming. Killian burying himself in a fantasy world of books because reality was just too hard for him comprehend.

And me? I lost moments in life that I'll never get back. I don't regret stepping up and caring for my siblings, I never will, but I became an adult, a father, a protector, a parent when I was only a teenager myself.

I still remember the summer holidays a few years before their death. It was the best summer of my life, one of the last summers where I got to be nothing more than a happy-go-lucky fifteen year old kid.

I spent that whole summer sneaking out past my curfew. I didn't care that if I got caught outside when the street lamps were already lit, that mom would probably kill me, all I cared about was the fun I knew my friends and I would have.

We would meet at the small stream that flowed at the base of the old farm yard just down the road from our houses. All ten of us would be dressed in our pyjamas, with our walkie talkies and flashlights in hand. We'd sit by the edge of the water, hours would pass in a blur as our carefree laughter filled the air.

On the way home, our teeth would be chittering, our pyjama pants would be soaked to the knees, but we didn't care. Every night we'd end up in the stream, no matter how many times we'd continue to say "I'm never doing that again", we done it anyway, all because Ryan really wanted a pet frog.

And that's what friendships for... right? You do what you can to make your friends happy, you stick by them through the tough times, tell them stupid jokes to make them laugh, that's what friendship is. At least, that's what I thought it was, until my parents died and my nine friends, who'd been my people for almost two decades, decreased to two.

Ryan and Julian were the only friends who stuck around when I was no longer the carefree, happy-go-lucky carefree boy they once knew. They stood by me when I had to become the man of the house. They were there when comforting my siblings was more important that sitting by the stream. They stayed with me, they stepped up and comforted them with me too.

Maybe I wasn't a kid in the eyes of most people. Nineteen was an adult, a teen. But it didn't feel that way for me. I still needed them, I still needed Mama's hugs and Papa's advice. I was coddled, I didn't know how to be a man or a father, they knew that, and all of a sudden they were gone.