Star

How can I be surrounded by so many people but feel so alone?

 

                Life is impossible to explain. One day you’re on the top of the world, laughing, breathing, just living. But the very next day you can drop down into hell.

 

                I can remember when my life was normal, and I was happy. It had been a great year in eighth grade. I was the president of my grade, had played in about ten different orchestra concerts, I was in five plays and three dance concerts. I had been playing the piano, violin, guitar, drums, and the harp since I was about five and had been taking dance classes since I was three. My whole life was set out in front of my, basically being carried to me on a silver platter.

 

                But sometime during the summer between those two years my life flipped upside-down. My older sister (who was fifteen at the time and she and I were really close) had been sick for a few months. My parents took her to the doctor as often as they could, but no one could see anything wrong with her. Until the day they took a blood test.

 

                After that everything was a slow blur. She was put in the hospital and was suddenly overwhelmed with different drugs and medicine to stop the blood cancer from killing her. The whole time I was somewhere in a white washed room, staring at her from the background, watching IV’s pump into her wrists or watching her swallow pills or wince and cry at all the shots.

 

                The details didn’t matter to me. The fact that she had an eighty percent chance of living didn’t register in my confused, blurred mind. I was just part of the horrible motion that came with the cancer. I gave up everything the day I found out about her. I lost everything.

 

                Three weeks went by and Julia (my sister) was able to come home from the hospital. I could remember how her smile light up her face as she walked through the front door to the familiar smell of our house. Her hair had been cut really short, but she had refused to let my mother shave it. She was shedding, but she didn’t want all of her hair to go because of the chemo. By that point I was no one.

 

**

 

                But all of that was the first three weeks. Nothing changed after that. The sun didn’t suddenly rise up over the dark mountain for me. My sister slowly pulled herself into a regular schedule, and she was able to do some of the simple things she always enjoyed, but not for me. Both my parents had good jobs, and while we were overwhelmed with bills even with the insurance, they we’re pretty much back to normal after the first year. Everyone was okay but me.

 

                When freshman year started I hid from all of my friends and hardly listened in class. I just kept thinking If I have nothing to live for, why should I live at all? I couldn’t help myself. While everyone else was moving on and getting back to their lives I was stuck somewhere in between. I wanted to be okay, I wanted to have my old life back, but something was holding me away from it.

 

                I was totally invisible. My parents couldn’t even see me. When I came home they would attempt to talk, but I would just mumble and head off to my room. The only thing I could do was write ‘poetry’ as a stupid attempt to keep myself alive. None of my poems were good, but they were all I had. My room went from a happy girl to a suddenly dark and depressed no one. Any family member that came over didn’t give a damn about who I was; all they cared about was Julia. Even she seemed to forget I was still there. We hardly ever talked and she didn’t even bother to ask if I was okay.

 

                School was no different. All the teachers would give me the same ‘look, it’s another lost hope’ look, and none of them cared whether I showed up or not. No one talked to me, and I didn’t socialize with them. Any of my old friends would look at me curiously, but that’s about as far as it got. I would pick up on simple conversation about me when I walked through the hallways; a lot of them were like:

 

“Hey, whatever happened to Emily? Did she die or something?”

“Emily is so different this year. She doesn’t even talk to anyone. I wonder what happened.”

 

“Did you hear about Julia? Maybe that’s why Emily’s acting so weird.”

 

                None of them ever said anything bad about me, but they couldn’t care less whether I was dead or alive. I just walked through the halls with my headphones blasting and my head down in attempt to avoid any conversation.

 

                Then came that fateful day when I totally cracked. It had been just like all the other days, but something inside me snapped. Before I knew what I was doing I was throwing the vases in my room against the walls, watching the glass shatter into a million pieces. Oh look, there goes my heart. I would think angrily. I picked up all of my trophies and slammed them into the wall or against my bed frame until the cracked. I yanked the boards off my walls and slammed all the tiny glass angels against the wall. I was so fed up with being invisible; I wanted to be heard.

 

                Of course, generally when glass is breaking in your house you can hear it. So my mom burst into my room while I was in mid-rage. My hand was a little cut and bleeding from the broken glass and I was sobbing uncontrollably. My mom reached over and grabbed the glass from me and then tried to calm me down. After a while she sat on the ground and pulled me into her lap. She rocked me in her arms as I cried and stroked my hair.

 

                Just as my sobs turned to shuttered little breaths my mom picked up one of the papers that had been through across the floor. Her face paled as she read it;

 

‘Just because you can’t see a broken heart doesn’t mean it’s not bleeding.’

 

                After that day my mom slowly pulled me back to my feet. But nothing she did could help. She still didn’t understand what I was going through. Sure, she could deal with a sick child with blood cancer, a depressed husband who stressed about everything, and obnoxious family members, but she didn’t know how to deal with me. Just when I was started thinking I would always be a lost case an angel saved me.

 

**

 

                It was over the summer of freshman and sophomore year. Julia would finally be going back to school for her senior year and the whole family was revolving around her again and forgetting about me. But one morning my mom took me down to an animal shelter. At first I thought she was actually trying to leave me there, but then she explained she wanted me to find someone to love.

 

                I walked around the cages and looked at all of the lost and sad animals thinking Oh my stars, why doesn’t’ somebody save them, until I found a cage with five Dalmatian puppies. Four of rushed over to me, happily panting and wagging their tails. But one of the puppies stayed back and stared at me with big brown eyes. I fell in love right away.

 

                At first it was hard because I had no idea how to care for myself, much less a puppy, but after reading some books I learned more about her and exactly how to take care of her. By day two with her, she was the center of my world. I spent hours training her, and then more time playing with her and walking her. After a long day she would snuggle with me on my bed while I wrote more poetry.

 

                Three months flashed by. I was suddenly laughing with the family, talking to my parents and sister and actually taking part when relatives came over. I named her Star, and the bond between us grew a hundred times every day. I needed her, to pull me out of the darkness I had been for more than a year, and she needed to me to show her what love was and to guide her through life. There wasn’t a second when I wasn’t with her.

 

                I put everything I had into her, and in return she handed me her heart. I had a quote engraved in her collar;

‘Together forever, never apart, maybe a distance, but never in heart.’

 

                And the bond between us grew as she grew up and I grew stronger. Sophomore year started and after a day of getting used to the schedule I talked to my old friends again and it was like we had never been strangers. I picked up dancing and all my insterments again, and I was studying as hard as I could at night so I could get good grades. I still took amazing care of Star, and she and I were always together.

 

**

 

Sometimes life throws something at you that you can’t handle, but always remember; you can make it. Star and I needed each other, and before we knew it we were living life again, happily. She gave me what I needed and I gave it back to her. When the world turned its back on us, we still had each other.

 

‘Loving someone means giving them your heart and trusting them not to break it.’