Through Glass(36)

I hadn’t come in here since the week after the world had changed. I hadn’t wanted to. I had searched for food, light and pictures and then I had closed the door, leaving this room alone for the past two years.

I don’t know why my feet had taken me here. Now that I was here though, I couldn’t seem to move myself forward.

I was leaving this house. I had to, to save myself. To put an end to everything. As much as this place had become a prison, all my memories were here. My life was here.

My chest constricted with the idea of losing that connection. Losing the small amount of normal that I still clung to. That wasn’t right, though; I wasn’t clinging to normal. I was clinging to shadows of what used to be. I had been a shadow. A shadow of guilt and fear that lived by the rules and challenged nothing. A shadow of who I used to be. I wasn’t normal.

Normal hadn’t been here in years.

It was going to be hard to leave behind the last memories of what life had been like before the world turned black. I wanted to take those memories with me.

That’s why I had come in here, I realized.

I stepped in silently, my feet quiet against the dust covered carpet as the pain I always kept restrained inside of me attempted to find its way out. I gently set the flickering light on the floor and then my fingers ran over the covers of the bottom bunk, gliding over them as if they were made of precious glass. A glass I could never replicate, never see again.

I wrapped my hand around the bed rails, glancing at the unfinished math homework on the desk and the half-finished Lego castle. Nothing had changed.

That was wrong because everything was different. And it was about to change again.

I crossed to the dresser quickly, pulling open drawers to reveal the perfectly folded clothes of my brothers. I shifted them around in search of something to take with me with the long forgotten smell of my mother’s laundry detergent floating up to me.

I grabbed a pair of camo pants and held them to my nose, smelling in the chemical scent of lilacs before shrugging out of shorts and pulling the pants over my tiny frame. The pants were more like capris on me.

I stripped off the oversized pajama shirt I wore as I moved to the other dresser, pulling a black superhero shirt over my head and placing my youngest brother’s Thor watch around my wrist.

I turned away from the dresser to scan the room. I was missing someone. I needed something from Travis. My eyes fell on the tattered backpack my oldest brother had carried with him since fourth grade, the union jack patch attached to the back, the edges frayed with the color appearing more green than blue under the dust.

I lifted it to the desk and began pulling out books and wrinkled papers, trying not to focus on the handwriting or the way my brother scribbled his “s” so they looked more like backwards z’s. Before I knew it, the pack was empty. My hands curled around the last few things that had been stuffed in the bottom of the bag.

A lighter and a mostly full pack of cigarettes.

My fourteen-year-old brother had been smoking.

Part of me wanted to be angry, to be mad that I hadn’t noticed, but I couldn’t even call those feelings up to their full power inside of me. He had tried to tell me, that day, before the world ended, hours before he… died.

I wondered if I had helped him, if he had been comforted. I hoped I had said enough, that I had helped him. I should have told him I loved him.

I should have told them all, every day.

I should have given my mother a hug before she left.

I should have begged her to stay.

My heart clenched painfully inside of me as the thoughts I tried to keep tucked into the forgotten spaces of my heart found their way out. The bones in my back tensed while my hands gripped the pack of cigarettes tightly and the pain tried to take hold of me. I grabbed the hurt and the fear, stuffing them back in; not willing to answer the questions, not wanting to feel the pain or the loss.

I already had enough loss, enough regrets. Now, Cohen was added to that. Cohen was the only thing that had made any of this worth it… and now he was gone, too.

I clenched my jaw as I stared at the crumpled pack of cigarettes in my hand. My eyes drifted to what I hadn’t truly seen before. The lighter.

I could make fire and fire produced light.

I held the lighter up to my ear and shook, hearing the gentle sloshing that released the last of the tension in my chest.

I placed the lighter back in the backpack, leaving the cigarettes on the table and began throwing a few more of my brother’s clothes in the bag before grabbing the light and making my way up the stairs to my parents’ room.

This room had not been left mostly untouched like mine and my brothers. This room had been destroyed on the very first day. After that day, I couldn’t even bring myself to come in here. I wasn’t sure why they had chosen to destroy my parents’ room and leave my brothers’ room untouched, but they hadn’t just destroyed my parents’ room, they had ripped it to shreds.

I walked into the room, my eyes focused on the two things I was here for. The only things of my parents’ that were worth taking. I stepped over a large chunk of mattress as I made my way to half of the dresser. I pushed aside scraps of wood, fabric, and pictures until I found it. My mother’s jewelry box, upturned and shattered on the floor.

I shifted my fingers through the shards of glass and wood in search of anything to take. My fingers felt for the smooth, cold snake of a chain, the cool metal circle of a ring. I pushed aside the glass until I found something. My hand lifted a fine golden chain out of the debris, a single pearl enclosed in the hanging pendant of a golden prison.