Forever

She loved Bruce Springsteen.

There is something about him that she found infectious, something inside of his music that set her free. Truly free, in a way I have never felt but have always been jealous that she has. I guess that is why I made sure that today, of all days, he is singing softly in the background, tethering my sister to this earth with his heavenly voice.

My parents did not understand my insistence that he play today, but then again they didn’t know her like I did, better than even myself. I knew her, and I knew that more than anything else she would want him playing as she is buried.

Buried.

It is so final.

So complete.

There really is no turning back now, she is truly gone. I kick at a stray stone feeling anger and hurt bubble from with inside of me. Bruce Springsteen is beautiful like always and I think I might hate that, despise it even, because she can no longer appreciate how wonderful he sounds.

I feel tears burn my eyes but I refuse to cry them. I refuse to let anyone see the pain written on my face. My sister did not die from some long arching disease, no she died at the hands of one of them… I am sure of it.

My sister was murdered.

Murdered by one of them, the ones that hold themselves higher than anyone else, who think that not even that not even murder can touch them, but it will. I will make sure. I will spend my life, if I have to, figuring out the truth. The truth of why my sister had to die at the hands of one of them at the tender age of seventeen.

My sister.

My heart is broken more than I can truly understand at this moment, but I refuse to show that pain because it pisses me off that after everything he put her through he is here. After all he has caused there is no conceivable way that it is okay he is here. I want to walk over and wipe that expression of sorrow and sadness from his stupid face.

I never did understand what my sister saw in Aiden. He to me always looked like a boy too old but yet too young to be a man. A boy like a million others with a crooked nose and misshapen teeth. He is and always will be ugly to me, not purely because of how he looks but because his heart is poison, and he hurt the one person I truly let myself depend on.

Aiden broke my sister into a million pieces and did not even have the decency to pick up those pieces and glue her back together. No he left that job to my sister and she never was strong enough to love herself back to whole.

I don’t just blame Aiden because despite knowing he didn’t kill her it feels like he did just that. I also blame all of them, her friends because one of them did it. I don’t know who but I know it is one of them, one of the ‘golden five’, the most popular and wealthy at my school, blended together into one mess of a friendship. My sister was part of the group, they used to be the ‘golden six’ but then my sister died and things changed… drastically.

It is hard to remember my sister, I am so terrified that one day I will wake up and she will be a distant memory, one that feels familiar and foreign at the same time. I am absolutely terrified that I will forget the sound of her tinkling laugh or her heartfelt voice.

My sister, she had these eyes, like a hurricane lived within them, full of spirit and wonderment. She lived her seventeen years more than most and for that I am grateful. That even before her death, she lived, really lived.

Tears burn at my eyes again and I realise I am staring, staring at him. I tear my vision away from him because he is not worth a second look let alone thought. I am still stuck on that expression on his face, I want more than anything to smack it off.

The tears dissipate and the anger wins out.

I am about to march over to him and cause a scene my sister would have been eternally embarrassed about and ask Aiden why he thought he could show up here, how he could disrespect my sister so? I know his stock answer will be one of forgiveness and love, but he didn’t love her. He didn’t love her enough to help, to be meaningful enough to help save my only sibling.

I stop, frozen to my spot, when I hear the sniff next to me. I turn stonily and stare at my mother, she is crying. It is such a foreign concept that it takes me a moment to fully comprehend what is going on. In all my fifteen years, I have never seen my mother cry. Not even when the police had found my sister bloody and broken, not even then so why now?

She grasps my hand almost as if she knows what I am going to do, almost like she can read my intentions across my face I have never really been burdened with tact or understanding for others, and my mother of all people understands this, and pulls me back with her strong grip. Pinning me beneath her pleading eyes, asking me that today I just let it go.

Let it go.

It seems such a foreign concept to me to let the people who are responsible for my sister’s death go without their proper punishment that they deserve. Her coffin is currently being lowered into the ground and I want more than I have ever wanted anything to jump on the casket and stop it from lowering because this cannot be how it ends. This cannot be the end to her story, she deserves to live.

The ground is wet and cold beneath my shoes and I want so desperately to feel connected to the earth to this world that I slip off my shoe and dig my painted black toes into the dirt. It sends a shiver up my spine, my mother is still grasping my hand, black and blue, and it hurts but I don’t say anything. I don’t think I could even speak if I wanted to.

I am losing my sister and it hurts. It fucking kills me, broken bones have hurt less than this grief settling itself into my heart. Where do we go from here? How do we live now that she is gone I can feel her loss in my heart, in my bones, deep with inside of me. I can feel it deep it in my soul like something pure and joyous has been stolen from me and I suppose it has, she was everything and more to me.

I know there is no cure for this pain, time heals all wounds they say but I don’t think they have ever felt this pain. This gut wrenching, teeth chattering, soul sucking chasm of pain that has opened with me and stolen my breath away.

I am lost.

I do not know which way is up and which way is down because none of this makes any damned sense. She shouldn’t be dead, we should be sitting on her bed talking about boys I don’t know, in a world I have never really understood, of privilege and love. In a world that ultimately killed her.

I wipe a painted black nail under my nose because of course it is winter and I am cold. My nose is running from the chill in the air. I fear it is not the weather making me so cold but rather my sister’s death. I am terrified that she is what is making me cold, not just in temperature but in life, in relationships and in love. How could she leave me like this?

So today I am sad but tomorrow I will be strong. I will face the day with the same fierceness that my sister never understood she possessed. And I will take what comes my way with poise and attitude because even though she could not handle it I can.

Today I am sad, but tomorrow I am strong.

Bruce Springsteen like always is beautiful and haunting much more than I could ever ask for. I know tomorrow will be harder than today and that is a truth I am ready to face. Without a glance over my shoulder, without a care for my broken mother I drop her hand I am still clutching so tightly and I walk away.

I leave my sisters body behind me because she is not really in that box, she is inside of me. Shaping me in ways I never could myself. I am ready to be free from the pain and suffering and I know there is only one way to be truly free. And that is to get the revenge that my sister could not.

I am ready to find my sisters murderer.

I am ready to be free.