One-Hundred Days

I can do this. I can do this. I can do this.

I bring my head from the safe place of my knees and shut my eyes.
"I can't do this."

The dark corners of the abandoned sun room were the only place not occupied by tears. I swear the lumps fixed into throats and the never ending tears could fill this house past the ceilings. In the next room over people were holding hands, and my mother was huddled into my father's chest. My brother was watching from behind them, somehow stuck in his ego that he was the only one affected by something such as this.

It's been like that since that day three years ago. He was the only one there, I don't know anything about it, I never saw our father cry for the first time, and I never watched our grandfather's strength drain straight from his body onto the floor.
I was never even there.

I'd never seen so many tears as I did on that day. I would walk around not even knowing I was crying, the silent tears that could be contained in the corners of my eyes. It's been three years and I still see those tears brimming in my father's eyes just behind the surface. They swim behind pale blue irises, a current in the clearest ocean.

I abandoned that room for the darkness. I placed my head on my knees and squeezed my eyes shut, anything to find that familiar darkness I had known since I was born. I could feel my heart try to burst out of my chest, just to run away and go stay with the rest of my family, but my body and mind couldn't take it. The tears that continuously streamed from my eyes drained every part of my body, they made my throat dry and my mind numb. I stopped thinking and acted only on instinct. I left the others to let the tears flow freely.

I could do nothing but curl up into a ball, and face the darkness that danced behind my lids, threatening and calm. I longed to feel safe in a moment where every bit of safety was slowly falling from everyone's shaking fingertips.
I was alone and safe and cold, shivering as the tears froze onto my face, when she walked in, a stranger to the family and saw me. I looked up and buried my head back into my knees. I turned my back to her, and she walked away, tears falling from her own eyes.
I turned my back on a person who somehow wanted to help me, so that I could help myself in a time where all hope was lost. The confidence doctors exuded meant nothing now, he had come home to die surrounded his family whose tears fell onto his drying skin.
All the tears but mine.