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Narrow Mountain Road
Contributed by
alyssakoren_03
on
Friday, 27th May 2005 @ 04:13:17 PM in AEST
Topic:
EmotionalPoetry
|
The narrow mountain road leading to the hospital was a sheet of ice. Knowing it was the last time I would be able to do so, I held my mother’s hand. This time she had gone too far, but for some reason I thought it was my fault.
It all started about two years ago, when my sister Christie got sick. We were fraternal twins, just like our mother and her mother before that. Christie had always been the “special” child, the pride and joy of the family, especially to our mother.
When we were young, Mother would play the piano, and Christie would sit on top of the piano, with her feet dangling down. Smiling and singing. I would sit outside the room with my ear pressed up against the door, and tears wetting my cheeks. “What is wrong with me?” I would think to myself. ‘Why didn’t mommy love me like she loves Christie? Did I do something wrong? Was I being punished?” Sometimes I would ask Mommy why she didn’t love me, but she never said anything. She would just kind of look at me, and her eyes would plead for me to understand. What was I supposed to understand? Times like that made me wonder, “Why did God put me here? Why did he put me somewhere where I didn’t fit, and where I wasn’t wanted. Was he punishing me, too?”
My father was never much help. Every time I would ask him why Mommy didn’t love me, he would reply the same way, “Of course she does.” It was the same with everyone else I asked. Why was everyone lying to me? I saw the way Mother looked at Christie, with love and pride. When she looked at me, that’s all it was, just a look. To my mother I was just a problem, an inconvenience to her perfect world.
As the years went on, I found myself wanting to be more like Christie. She was always smiling. I didn’t understand how she could be so happy when I was so sad. But then I guess if I knew I was loved, I would feel more complete and happy too. Christie was always so energetic and content. I wanted to be like that. I wanted to be small and graceful like her. I didn’t want to be myself, tall, clumsy, and alone. I hated being alone. I hated coming home to parents who only had eyes for Christie. Everyday I would return to the house to a family that ignored me, and every night I would cry to the only person I knew….myself, and I hardly even knew her. I didn’t know why I would cry, which always made me weep harder, knowing that I had nothing while the girl just on the other side of the wall had everything.
The day Christie got sick, everything changed…for the worse. Christie never got sick. She was always healthy, happy, and enthusiastic. Things were normal at first, and it seemed as if she had the flu. At least that’s what we thought. I wasn’t really concerned. Nothing bad ever happened to Christie. Father, like usual, wasn’t worried. He never worried about anything, except himself. Mother, on the other hand, was on pins and needles. The whole first week Christie was sick Mother attended to her every need. I remembered the days when I was sick and mother would avoid my room, even more than usual, simply because she didn’t want to get sick herself.
As the days went on Christie became even more ill. She began to develop headaches that started to grow steadily worse. She even lost some of her memory. Some days I would go in to check on her, and she would be sitting there, just staring at me with a silly smile on her face. Her eyes had looked so scary, lost and bewildered. Something had told me it was more than the flu, but I never said anything. Nothing serious could ever happen to Christie. She was always the one without any problems.
The headaches eventually worsened to the point where Christie was close to screaming in pain. I did feel sorry for poor Christie. But I knew that soon enough she would get better and everything would go back to normal. Christie would go back to being the center of attention, and I would go back to being the forgotten child alone in her room. Things never did get better. The day they took her to the hospital seemed like a blur to me. Everything happened so fast. I had no idea what was going on until I saw my father carry Christie out of her room. Her normally radiant skin had looked pale, and her face looked like it had aged ten years in only ten days. I had watched, horrified, as her frail body shook as she struggled to breth. That’s when I had realized something was wrong. I had just stood there as they laid Christie in the car, waiting for something, some hint of what was happening.
We found out later that week that Christie was dying…fast. The doctors weren’t quite sure why. They thought maybe she had a brain tumor. My mother had screamed at them to fix Christie’s brain, to fix her baby, to make her whole again. But there was nothing they could do, nothing any of us could do.
Christie died two months later. Sometimes I wished that she would have died sooner, so that she wouldn’t have had to spend those two months, suffering in the hospital. I had visited her daily, but going to the hospital always made me depressed. “It should have been me in that hospital bed,” I would tell myself. “I should have been the one who died.”
What had happened to Christie seemed like a dream to all of us. My mother reverted to a fantasy world, walking around the house in a daze. At night I would hear her crying out Christie’s name. I would try to comfort her, but she would just push me away. It hurt so badly that my own mother, the women that had given birth to me, wouldn’t even let me hug her.
I thought that maybe after Christie’s death, things would change between me and my mother, but nothing ever did. Instead of paying more attention to me, like I hoped she would, she became more distant and withdrawn from everyone especially myself.
During the following weeks she never came out of her room. Her once healthy appetite had diminished into barley nothing.
When she did ventur out of her solitude, I hardly recognized her. Her dull eyes would peer at me from under a blanket of unkept stringy hair.
Before long, she didn’t seem to recognize me anymore. When she had looked at me, she had looked through me. Sometimes she would just stare blankly, others she would start screaming and yanking at her hair. Occasionally she even became violent with my father and me, throwing things and hitting us with such force it would knock us of our feet.
I had tried to explain to my father what was happening to my mother, but he wouldn’t listen. He never listened to anything I said. I couldn’t figure out why he ignored my concern for my mother. Maybe it was because he refused to believe it, as sometimes I had.
I had tried to fix what was going on with my family and I had tried to fix my mother’s broken heart, but nothing I did seemed to help. I wanted to fix things between us; I wanted everything to be all right.
My life went on this way for two years, until one day I guess my mother just got fed up with everything, with me, with my father, with the aching loss in her heart, and most of all… her life.
And now here I was holding her hand…as I looked down at her child like face. She opened her eyes and looked at me as if she just realized who I was. Her frail hand squeezed mine one more time. “I’m sorry,” she whispered, and she was gone. She didn’t have to explain what she had said. I knew what she meant. She was sorry about neglecting me all those years, she was sorry about not being there when I had needed her most, and she was sorry for not being the mother she could have been.
“Maybe not everything was meant to be okay,” I thought. Maybe not all stories were meant to have a happy ending.
It had taken almost two years to realize I had absolutely no talent for fixing things.
Copyright ©
alyssakoren_03
... [
2005-05-27 16:13:17]
(Date/Time posted on
site)
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Re: Narrow Mountain Road
(User Rating: 1 )
by jyssvw22 on
Friday, 27th May 2005 @ 09:03:19 PM AEST
(User
Info | Send
a Message)
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| you are a great writer, i wish you luck |
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