Читать книгу Where We Came From - Tigress Dekko - Страница 10

[14 years old]

A rough week, the talk of hospitalization weighty in the air around me,

My best friend in Parkside, and a relapse on triple cs

It’s a cold November night and I am all alone

My mom and brother are both at work so I am the only one at home.

I sit in the living room in the dark, zoning out into nothing

There’s a knock at the door; it’s late and I didn’t expect to have anyone coming

I get up and go to the front door, there I find an old family friend

I know her son, he played baseball with my brother way back when

I haven’t spoken to her in years

I’m confused as to why she is here

“Do you know anything about the disappearance of Nikkita Dawning?”

It takes a second for me to register it, and a moment longer to keep myself from fainting.

She runs me through the details: a sleep over at a friend’s house she never returned from.

I spoke to that girl only two days ago, what have I done?

She called me to say she was moving to California and that she was sorry for breaking my heart

I told her I respected the fact she finally owned up to hurting me, but that being friends with her would be too hard

I didn’t want to let her back in, she still caused too much pain

If I had reacted differently would things still be the same?

“You know where I live, so stop by if you have any more information.”

She leaves and I run to my room, where I become pinned to my door by the desperation of the situation

I slide to the floor and can’t help but sob my fucking heart out

I know who she is with, but I don’t know how it came about

I know, I know, I know she left with the boy she loved, and that she could be anywhere

Or do I? What if she left to kill herself and she wanted us all to be spared?

I dig through my underwear drawer, find my pills, swallow them all

When the love of your life vanishes you realize the world isn’t that small

She could be an hour away, fourteen hours away, a fucking lifetime away

All I can think is: is she safe? Is she happy? Is she high? Has she eaten today?

I rack my brain and find the courage to walk the few blocks to the Schiavo’s

I show them her Tumblr and posts she made about being ready to leave, she planned it all out, how she would go

I remembered seeing them before and being confused as to what they meant

I bring them up now to remind everyone, and myself, that I don’t think she’s dead.

I am asked to go to her house and speak with her parents, it might help them to know the things that I do

When we arrive, they both hugged me tightly and said “We missed you.”

Nikki and I haven’t been friends in months, I don’t even know the last time I had been inside of her house; I feel like an impostor sitting in her living room

Her absence is so unbelievably present in the deepening gloom

I give her parents a run down of her mental health and drug abuse, as much as I had known

She was depressed and had recently told me that she had been doing quite a bit of blow

I gave them the hard bits, and they gave some to me by asking if I could read all the letters she had left behind, tucked under a pillow

Letters saying goodbye to the people she loved; I didn’t receive a note.

I read all of them, but didn’t know what to say, there weren’t any extra clues

So I was left feeling even more helpless because even I didn’t know what to do

Suddenly, the drugs start kicking in; in the mess of everything I almost forgot that I had taken them

Luckily, I’m told I’m allowed to go home, and as I walk past her room I tell myself not to look in

But the door’s open and I do it anyway: there’s two boys on her floor trying to hack into her computer and her iPod

That was the hardest part of the night, that was when everything stopped

And for an instant that felt like an eternity I was sat in the reality that the girl I loved was gone without a trace

It felt like confronting death, only to find it didn’t have a face

There were no answers, no cure, no remedies

Only questions, anguish, memories

On the car ride back, my mom calls me asking where I am at

I can’t find the words, so I hand the phone off; I’m tripping bad

I don’t remember getting home, don’t remember speaking to my mom, don’t remember anything other than going straight to bed

And all of the fucked up scenarios running through my head

Seeing her face right in front of me, hearing her voice say she loved me, hearing myself say I couldn’t anymore

I wish I would have never opened that goddamn door

I wish I had never opened up my heart at all because this pain is the realest I have ever felt

This week has been a shit show, but this is the worst blow that’s been dealt

That memory, that moment,

“Do you know anything about the disappearance of Nikkita Dawning?”

Has been ingrained into my mind for the rest of my life

I will never be able to erase it, and trust me, I have tried

So I went to bed that night high as a kite, thinking about how the world is so damn unpredictable

That love can make you feel fucking despicable

So many times before she had made me feel like nothing, but I blamed myself now more than anyone else

She wasn’t in love with me, but we had been friends, I could have been there to help

If I hadn’t been so absent, so selfish, these last few months I would have been aware that she had felt like she needed to leave

Maybe I could have helped her find a way to stay, and for that I had to grieve

Because not only was she gone, for God only knows how long, but I also had to once again come to the realization that I wasn’t enough to keep her around

All I could do now was pray to a God that I didn’t believe in that she would someday be found.