Always Believe by Aimée

Author:Aimée [Aimée]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781701758353
Published: 2019-10-23T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter 15

You left me, sweet, two legacies,—

A legacy of love

A Heavenly Father would content,

Had He the offer of;

You left me boundaries of pain

Capacious as the sea,

Between eternity and time,

Your consciousness and me.

Emily Dickinson

Angela was having one of her dark days – one of those days where she stayed in bed, in the dark, and pondered whether she wanted to die. She didn’t have them as frequently as during the first weeks, of course, but now that the school term was over, she found herself as a loose end. Even though she still had a lot of admin to do, without teaching or pastoral care, her schedule had lightened considerably, leaving more than enough space for thinking and grieving. Sometimes she thought – only fourteen months ago. And sometimes – already fourteen months. But the ending was always the same – Sybil would never be coming back. She would never hear her laugh again, she would never see her becoming an adult, she would never see her get married or have children of her own. She had heard so many platitudes, so much bullshit – even the most well-intentioned people could be cruelly thoughtless. Among the “at least she didn’t suffer” – no one would ever know that, “she is in a better place now” – why on earth? Her place was here, not in a non-existent heaven - or “it was her time”, there had been “time heals everything” and “life goes on”. That last one perhaps rang true the most cruelly, as people forgot, and even though most of the time that’s what she wanted – to be ordinary, it could also hurt. And it even hurt when life felt good, when life tried to reinsert a little joy in her existence. Surely no one would deny her a little happiness again – except herself. If she laughed with a colleague, if she enjoyed a movie, the little voice in the back of her head, the voice that told her she was right to start feeling again, soon drowned under a booming “Sybil will never be alive again.”

On those dark days, she turned to Sybil’s blog. Or journal, since her daughter had kept it private. She hadn’t found it immediately – a few weeks after Sybil’s death, the headmistress of the school had phoned her and told her one of Sybil’s classmates had come and told her about it. She had given a title to it “Travels of a Broken Swan.” Most of it made for heart-rending reading. She had been picked on from her first days at the school by a group of girls, and it had quickly escalated from teasing and bad jokes, to completely ignoring her, to physical bullying. The girls had told Sybil she was too fat, she would never be a ballerina, and several times, they had held her down and force-fed her cake and coke. Sometimes they’d forced her to vomit, and sometimes they’d forced her not to. Even now, Angela wept when she read what Sybil had written: “I’m a fat pig – I’ll never be a dancer.

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