When you're sitting in the waiting room.

When your mind begins to imagine the outcomes. The pain.  The loss that would be soon to come, you want to find an escape. But then you realize, there is none. There is no way to outrun the tears and the mental cages that the world traps you in, that you trap yourself in. No matter how loud you scream, your only adversary is yourself.

Then again, you’re in the waiting room,

Helpless,

alone.

It’s hard to imagine a pain that cuts through your skin and makes your words bleed. It’s hard to have no control over anything. Even over your own feelings. All you can do is watch life unravel as you prepare for the few life changing phrasings: “i’m sorry for your loss.”

No decision in life or death, just the agonizing and bitter truth that you want to wash away like water, but stains your mind with the pain. A recollection of the bruised memories that pass over you, runs through your veins and stays frozen in your conscience.

I was in the waiting room.

I was trapped in the mental roadblock of trying to carve out a scenario where pain was not the only outcome. Where even I, in a hopeless situation, could reach out a grab the slightest sliver of happiness that the world wanted to spare me with. But no, even the least expecting people are electrocuted by misery.

I wanted to forget the guilt of my bruised conscience. However, sometimes the guilt of the past wants to hang onto my shoulders and steps into the place of my shadow, following me around, blocking the light. Blocking the sun from touching my scarred skin, my tanned and experienced memories. But I try to blind myself from the pain. I try to blind others from seeing me in that pain. And at times, that lingering darkness seeps into my skin. Sometimes, the guilt cuts in too deep to the point where I’m too mentally wounded to keep going, that I have to let go. Except, I knew letting go wasn't an option for me.

I hope it will never be.

The past is apart of me, it is the only thing I am hanging onto. The only thing that reminds me of who I was, and who I am now.

Who I wanted to be.

Driving home, they told me she had cancer. They told me that our life was now infected with that wicked disease. Emotionally unaware, I put up my barriers that I failed to let back down. I tried to block out the world, block out the reality of knowing that everything would begin to change, but in the back of my mind, I understood that I would soon have to accept this deadly truth. As the days passed by like fading memories that would soon disappear from my grasp, she was only getting worse. We were only getting worse.

Don’t be sad, I told myself.

Don’t be negative, I told myself.

She will survive, our family will survive. I wished to myself.  I begged myself. I got down on my knees and pleaded to myself.

Then again, not all wishes come true. Not all dreams tend to turn into reality no matter how long you want to hold on to them for. In the end, everything is taken from us. Our life, our lies, our attempts to make things seem “normal.”

The innocence that gets stolen from us, more like kidnapped from our closed grasps will never be returned, more like turned into a forever lasting sorrow.  I've wanted to believe a truth, believe my truth, believe a fantasy. Sometimes I try to hide from the truth, try to cover my eyes from the darkness that is hidden beneath all the happiness because I have been beaten by the truth, beaten by words that have left scars in my mind. That have haunted the memories of my past and damaged my remaining moments of the future. I suffocated my mind with an imaginary truth that I wanted to believe, that she would live. I was just drowning myself in lies that would temporarily save my heart from tearing into too many pieces to put back together again.

Being so young, it is hard to fully understand the complexity of the lies that your parents were trying to trap you in, that everything would be okay. Those were just some helpless words used to try to blind you from the darkness that would soon prevail over your life, over all living things, the truth.

I was ten years young.

I became aged, old, fractured, broken in a matter of months.

She, my mom, gone like the whisper the wind leaves after a thunderstorm.

Gone like the sun after the colors dance across the sky. Because now that the colors are gone, there is just darkness.

Darkness inside myself.

Darkness.

She left me.

Left me alone,

Left me to fend for myself against the world.

The nasty world.

They have told me to find the good in the world.

The good in people.

But it gets hard when I can't even find the good in myself.