Will You Catch Me If I Fall?

Prologue

I was fifteen the day I became invisible to my parents.
I was fifteen when they stopped seeing me, lost in their pain and their grief, unable to see the others who were suffering just like them.
I was fifteen when my older sister died in a car crash, aged just eighteen.

Stephanie had always been the perfect one. Perfect looks, perfect grades, perfect friends, perfect personality.
She was everything to me. My sister, my role model, my guidance, my protector, my best friend.

I had bailed on going to the movies with her that day. Another Johnny Depp film just didn’t appeal to me. So she went with her current boyfriend Ben.

Maybe if I had gone, she wouldn’t have died.
Maybe if I had gone, she’d still be here.
Maybe I wouldn’t.
Maybe I’d have died instead.

Maybe that would have been better…

I tried everything to forget the pain of losing Steph. To try and fill that empty void she had previously filled. To try and fill the pain of losing my parents as well. Of losing myself. The guilt, the self-disgust, the misery..

I stopped eating for a while.
I self harmed.
I got piercings.
I got tattoos.

None worked. I was as empty as ever. Still feeling that stifling pain.

I tried a different tactic.

I went from party to party, nightclub to nightclub.

Drink, drugs and sex

That became my life. What I lived for.

Because I was no-one. I deserved no-one.
I should have been the one to die. Not her.

And each night, after each sinful, devil filled night, I’d hope that maybe today I’d would have taken too much. Maybe today my body would have enough, would shut down…forever.

Maybe today the world will claim me, as it claimed Steph.

I was a shattered soul, a shattered heart, a shattered human being.

And then I met this boy.

Who piece by piece.

Put me back together.