Needed, not wanted

Needed, not wanted.

I always grew up with my ‘friends’ telling me that I was needed by my family, not wanted by my parents.

When I was young I thought they loved me.

Each time they stuck needles in my arm or laid me on a cold metal table and told me to “hold still sweetie, the doctor is going to make you feel better!” I believed them. I’d cry then, not because each pinch of lidocaine burned my flesh or the scalpel glinted closer with each labored breath, but because my parents would leave me in the room by myself with the doctor and the nurses.

At five years old, I used to cry when they’d leave me back then.

Now, I don’t cry.

At least not for them.

At eight years old, my parents had me taking a cap-full of chalky pills each morning and night.

“You need these, they’ll help you get better!”

Fake smiles.

Still, I took the damn pills, allowed the drowsiness to overcome me, to numb my emotions, dull my awareness.

They love me, they’re doing this because they love me. They want me. I’d tell myself with each gulp.

At ten years old, I had my kidney removed along with some bone marrow. The pain was excruciating. I was hospitalized for weeks, stuck sucking on ice chips while my father drank away his own pain out of the water bottle we all knew wasn’t water from the corner of the hospital room.

My parents told me I’d gotten too sick and one of my kidneys had to be taken out in order to make me feel better. As for the marrow surgery, I didn’t know what it was for. Mom just told me that the doctors needed to run tests.

My friends kept urging me each day while I was in the hospital to see what their parents had told them was going on.

“You’re needed, not wanted, Kenz. You need to see it.”

I cut off all relationships after that; the only friends I had from then on were the characters on the TV screen from the corner of my room.

Over the years, the doctors removed more parts of me, injected more medicines, told me I was too sick to live without the treatments.

Little did they know that I was learning.

I didn’t want to learn.

I needed to.

Now, at seventeen, I’m writing this log from the janitor’s closet of DCMU hospital. Whoever finds this, call the number I’ve left on the back of this letter. I know the truth now; I want freedom from this. I know now my parents only conceived me to be my sister's donor, the sister I never knew I had. I was never the sick one. She was. All of those meds over the years, just sedatives to keep me in the dark. I have to go, but please tell my parents I know the truth. I was never wanted.

I was needed.