The Missing Half

by Ashley Flowers

But more than that, I learned years ago that numbness is better than pain. I’ve been not talking for so long, I’m not sure I’d even know how to start.

Most people’s reaction when they’re confronted is fight or flight. I freeze. And I hate myself for it.

Over time, my grief has morphed to anger. Now it lives just beneath my skin. Prick it and I bleed.

This is why I didn’t want to talk about the past. My emotions get too heavy to hold.

I try to smother it. As I’ve learned, optimism only ends in pain.

The idea of me raising a baby right now is absurd. I couldn’t even take care of a cat.

“No. I can’t imagine our mom ever stepping foot into a church. She never really believed in anything but herself.”

Two branches of the same tree, two pieces of a soul. Where one sister goes, the other will be, for she is but half of the whole.

For the millionth time in my life, I wish I were a different kind of person. A better kind.

But just as longing starts to fill my chest, I replace it with numbness.

I drink like my mom, and for seven years, I’ve been just like my dad too: content to hide my wounds from myself so long as it meant I never had to examine the pain. But all that does, I realize now, is make the sores fester and grow.

My body is trying to turn itself inside out, to punish me for all my bad decisions, and I don’t blame it.

I’m tired, and burned out from disappointment,

can’t keep living like this. I can’t keep avoiding my pain by drinking myself to sleep and hoping someone else will come along and clean up after me. I can’t keep bailing when something starts to get scary.