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“I have come to understand that death, for the sick, is not so hard to endure. For us, eventually our pain ends, we go to a better place. But for those left behind, their pain only magnifies.”
She looked over her shoulder, to where Rune was sitting on the bed, laying kiss after kiss on my older sister’s hands, her fingers, her face, looking at his Poppymin like he always had—like she had been designed solely for him.
In that moment, I lost something in my soul that I knew I would never get back.
I was simply broken. I didn’t know how to heal, how to put myself back together again. The truth was, when Poppy died, all light vanished from my world, and I’d been stumbling around in the dark ever since.
complete, my newly found time became my enemy. Idle hours spent reliving Poppy fading, her slowly dying before us. Endless minutes that gave my anxiety breathing room to strike, to draw out its advances like mercenaries toying with an easy target. I felt Poppy’s absence like a noose pulling tighter around my neck day by day.
A large cloud rolled in, and I stilled. It looked exactly like a cello.
Those four years had not changed a thing. A pause button had been pressed that day. And I hadn’t been able to press play since.
“So she won’t miss out on new adventures,” he would tell me. Then there were the days when he would visit Poppy, and I would sit behind a nearby tree, unnoticed and hidden, and listen to him speak to her. When tears would cascade from my eyes at the unfairness of the world. At us losing the brightest star in our skies, at Rune losing half of his heart. As far as I knew, he had never dated anyone else. He told me once that he would never feel about anyone else the way he felt about Poppy and that although their time together was short, it had been enough to last him a lifetime.
Because she was buried in the ground behind me. Eternally seventeen. The age I was now. Never to grow old. Never to shine her light. Never to share her music. A travesty the world would forever be deprived of.
I gave myself over to hate—of the world, of people, of everything that stood to expose what I’d buried down deep.
“But the thing I’ve found hardest since we lost Poppy…” I held my breath, waiting for what she would say. Ida’s shoulders dropped and she whispered, “Was that awful day… I lost you too.”
“I don’t know how to come back.”
The minute I saw that smile, something inside of me calmed. A wave of peace crashed over me. And for second—a single euphoric free moment—everything stilled. Not numbed. Never numbed. But seeing that smile… I didn’t understand why it affected me so much. She was just a girl. And it was just a smile. But, for a split second, there was a cease-fire within me.
