Best Kind of Broken

43 Pixie

There is nothing extraordinary about today.

It is just a day. A Saturday, to be exact, at the end of July. The morning birds are chirping outside. The wind is blowing through the fields out back. And I am alive.

Lying in bed, I roll onto my side and stare at the four gray paintings hanging on the far wall. Sadness does not flood into me like I anticipate. Nor does anger or peace. The only thing I feel, as the waking sunbeams slide over my sheet-wrapped body, is longing. Deep, wailing longing.

Not for the girl in gray—that girl is at peace and unbroken—but for the boy next door, who is anything but. And yet the boy next door feels farther away than the girl in gray.

I let out a long, slow breath as I stare at Charity’s face. Today marks the one-year anniversary of her death. A year has gone by, but somehow no time has passed. I’m still here, at the precipice of my future, waiting for life to happen. I’m still the broken girl who woke up in a hospital bed without her best friend, without her hero.

I thought time stopped for me, but time is not something I ever had or ever will have. It simply is. It never begins. It never ends. So the sun rises and sets, and my scar heals and fades, and the morning birds chirp on.

There is nothing extraordinary about today, except that it has come and I have lived to see it.

But perhaps that is precisely what makes today more extraordinary than any day before.

With a deep breath, I get out of bed.