Aspirin

A Story by Emily

I've been told by many people that writing about the night my sister tried to kill herself would help me cope. I don't know how well it worked, but it certainly turned out to be a story.

It is almost midnight, and I am reading. My earlier attempts at sleep have failed miserably, so I have given up and allowed myself the luxury of escaping into one of my many fantasy lands. But tonight, something is wrong. Something about the way the light slants through my blinds, or maybe it’s the odd flow of the air. It is subtle but undoubtedly there. Later, I will know what I felt. I will know that the strange air was not a dirty filter or an obstructed vent, but the barrier of a life slowly waning away. The life of my little sister. Fourteen years of living and a bottle of aspirin can do a lot of damage.

Tonight is the night that I will save my sister’s life.

“Too many,” is all I hear, “I took too many.”

The adrenaline that courses through my veins will sear all memory of these crucial few

minutes from my mind. Minutes of two word phrases and sobs and the controlled panic of an emergency. My mother takes over phone duty, relaying information to an anonymous hero on the other end of the line. I am sitting with my back against the bathroom door, facing my glassy eyed baby sister. Saying anything that comes to mind. Spouting off random babble about Six Flags and best friends and the prom I want to see her go to. Asking how I can survive without her. Insisting that she absolutely will not give up.

All to the response of “just let me go.”

At this point I have run out of things to say, which baffles me. How could I have said everything? I am realizing that I do not know which parts of what I am saying will make her want to stay and which parts will remind her of how much she does not want to be here. I am realizing that I really do not know my sister. And I am having this revelation at the very moment in which I may lose her.

I am utterly and completely overwhelmed.

Sirens outside alert me to the fact that I had gone to bed in only a t-shirt and my underwear. Yet oddly, uncharacteristically, the thought barely registers, even as the policeman walks through my room into the small bathroom that separates my world from my sister’s.

Spilled aspirin stick to my bare feet as I take the ten seconds to pull on jeans and a bra.

After a brief moment of confusion as to how I’m going to get there, I am following the blaring sirens and blinding lights of the ambulance that carries the shadow of my sister down the interstate. I have never driven by myself on the interstate, let alone in the pitch blackness of the post midnight hours.

The hospital smells like all hospitals do. Like someone has tried to cover up the smell of the dead and dying. And failed, miserably.

I watch my sister drink down charcoal, her black rimmed mouth now matching the deep circles under her eyes. I feel like I am the one who needs to throw up. The next few hours are spent sitting on the floor and then a small plastic chair in the overly sterile hospital hallway. I am offered a more comfortable seat inside my sister’s room, or in the lobby. Somehow the possibility of comfort feels horribly inappropriate. I am supposed to be cold, my back should hurt and my feet must be falling asleep. Somehow I think that if I am uncomfortable, my sister will live. I am undoubtedly in full on shock. I have to be dreaming. There is no way that this is actually happening.

What about Dad… I think. A consequence of having divorced parents that I hadn’t thought about: when do you notify your father that his youngest daughter has tried to die? I don’t think I can say the words out loud. I can’t even think them. Amazingly my mother, the woman who has not spoken to my father in probably eight years, calls and leaves the fateful message. This strangely makes me feel immensely better. I did not want to have to be the one to tell my father that somewhere along the line one of us screwed up massively. That would just be too much for this endless night.

Somewhere around four o’clock my mom ferries me home in my car (what with that ever important midnight curfew, right?) and picks up her own. I strip off the jeans and bra that were so hastily thrown on and sit on my bed. I don’t even try to fall asleep, I just hope for some sort of semiconscious reverie to take me, one where I am unaware of the last five horrifying hours.

There are aspirin on my bedroom floor.

I do eventually drift off, to be woken periodically by a gut wrenching guilt that I am sleeping and comfortable and not thinking about her.

The next few days are merely endless hours of a numb disbelief which slowly turns to grief and then anger. The anger will last for weeks to come, along with the aspirin that remain on my floor.