Narrative

The morning is crisp and bright. The air of early fall chills my skin. The grass is moist and glistening, laden with early morning dew. Step to the line. Shake out my hands. Every muscle in my body is shaking; a dead weight in my stomach clenching iron fists around my heart. I’m nervous. This is normal.

One whistle. Feet behind the line, hasty last-minute coaching instructions. Two whistles. Tense up, sink down, spikes grinding into the soft dirt. Stress is rising. Swallow it down. God, why can’t we just race already? The gun goes off.

I run.

The start of the race is the hardest battle. To achieve good positioning for the rest of a cross country race, a full sprint must be started and maintained, your body struggling all the while to catch up with your brain and eventually the pounding heart and steady stream of runners pushing you harder and faster, drowns out the earlier panic of the moments before the gun went off. The race has begun.

If you’re a 5K runner you would say the second mile is the hardest. Perhaps that’s true. No running is easy, the entire race is a burning pain as your brain battles your muscles, screaming that your body isn’t meant for this.

But it is. And I enjoy the race. For just a moment, I have absolutely nothing to focus on except my feet hitting the ground over and over, as fast as I can.

When the race is over, that’s when it hurts. Sprint through the finish line, and suddenly I feel everything. The not-so dull ache of every limb, the scorching desert in my mouth, and the dry heaving and gasping as my lungs swallow as much air as possible. Focus in on that moment. The trembling. The pain. Tears leaking out for no reason other than that’s all my body knows how to do in this moment of shock, the numbness as mind and body struggle to catch up, to send the signal that everything is okay. It’s over. You ran a good race.

That’s when I think of him. Because the heart-pounding sickness that comes in the few minutes after a race is what it felt like to lose him. Amplified and never-ending, every day waking up in that panicky state, with no reprieve of having run a good race, and no guarantee that this feeling will ever go away.

A tragedy is only a tragedy until it happens to you. Then it becomes a movie playing on repeat. A moment in time looping endlessly. It’s cruel watching your life fall apart again. And again. And again and again and again, again, again, on the back of your eyelids.

It’s funny, but as a talkative person I don’t remember saying much that day. It was a normal day. Quiet, but normal.

“You talk with your hands a lot.”

“Don’t make fun of me, David. I just-yeah,” I continued to talk with my hands, sticking my tongue out at him. A bell probably rang.

“I don’t want to go to healthhhhh.” Something I complained about on a daily basis.

“You got this Abigail, we are just killing this whole school thing. I’ll text you.” A normal day. Normal smiles between my best friend and I. Normal.

A study day first period made me dazed and sleepy. Earbuds in, blaring music, I didn’t notice the almost eerie quiet of my peers. Quiet was normal for us in the morning. Each of us struggled to define our own normals after losing a classmate, a teammate, a friend.

Advisory was confusing. Something seemed off, but then again, last week had been off. Last week the wariness, the quiet, had seeped into the classrooms and hallways. But this week was supposed to be better. The worst was over. We had survived the chilling quiet that came when we lost Jacob. Everything was going to go back to normal. Normal.

Normally students don’t leave math class in droves crying. Panic set in. It was a curious panic, nervousness, not yet a fear.

I should have been more afraid.

“What happened?” Two words that I never want to hear again, for all the times they flitted between the lips of students.

I shouldn’t have asked. The answer I received would never leave me, forever etched in my brain, a perfect mental image of a text, not even one sent to me, but a text that broke me. Even now, almost mostly healed, I’m unable to type the words I saw on that screen.

As a reader, as a writer, I should’ve been able to find the words. I always have words at my disposal, sorted and categorized in my brain, ready to be displayed.

Normally, high school students don’t have to learn how to live with the heartbreaking question marks attached to two lives taken by their own hands within a week of each other.

I was rendered speechless.

One might say I was in shock, or denial. But I knew. I knew in the deepest cavern of my heart that it was true, but that would never stop me from wishing otherwise. My mother, later reflecting on the fact, said that I kept repeating that I was scared. And I was, how could I not be?

The details from there are hazy. Trancelike and stricken, I waited. In the gym, in classrooms, in the arms of those who mean the most. Like most of the student body, I left and went home. Looking back on it, I should’ve stayed to run.

I should’ve stayed to run.

I didn’t stop crying until I was asleep, having rubbed my eyes raw. There were other people that week - there always are - who offered comforting words and hugs to share. We came together as we all fell apart.

I loved Ben the way you love every person you think is going to be in your life forever; not enough. He was my first crush in a new school, the object of my affections with very good reason. He was bright. He was funny. He was the perfect boy next door. But even that term isn’t right. I’m still speechless and lacking, always grasping for just the right thing to say about him. I don’t have enough memories. I always assumed I would have time to make more. Of course I loved him. If you knew him you would have too. The real tragedy is that I only started loving him properly, loving him without fail, loving him with that love you’ll never let go because your hearts are too tangled, when I lost him.

I lost him.

We lost him.

I could argue that it isn’t fair. Only 14 at the time, I wasn’t, I’m still not ready for losing him. You shouldn’t be ready. It isn’t “normal.” Fair isn’t a factor.

“Life isn’t fair.” A popular saying by any and every peeved adult. Think about it and you might realize that really, death is the one making life so unfair for the living.

A nice embroidered throw pillow could tie things up with a pretty bow, making it all seem okay with an inspirational quote about strength, or moving on. We all eventually found our own ways to heal.

It hurt. It’s honestly the most broken, most completely torn open and lost I’ve ever felt. In times like now, writing this story that I’ve written hundreds of times before, trying and failing over and over to get it right, not for someone else to understand, not for someone else to feel sorry for me, not for my school, but for me. It’s just for me.

Others might read it. Maybe that will help them to hold on tighter. But it’s for me. It’s for me to know that it’s okay that this part of me shattered in a way that can’t be fixed because I gave the pieces to him.

This story, while about Ben, isn’t for him, no matter how much I loved him.

It’s for me to separate myself from being haunted and hunted by my own deep sorrow.

Although he follows me everywhere, it isn’t because I haven’t recovered.

I cross the finish line of a race and feel that aching, crushing, terrifying, heart wrenching, gasp of completion.

I’m not running away from him.

I’m not running away.

I’m running with him.

I’m running for him.

My own inability to move on isn’t shoving me back anymore, preying on my heart.

I’m just running a race.

I’m just running to run.

I’m just running.