Diffused

A Story by Aehr

It’s not easy to let out a breath when you wish one of your next ones would be your last.

Its’ not easy when you want to close your eyes and never open them again. Because you know that you are weak. You know that you cannot handle the weight of being alive any more. It feels like you’re in the middle of an inky black void of nothingness and you’re waiting to melt into the darkness with each blink, each quiver of your lips, and each time your heart beats. Keeping your eyes open seems like the hardest thing to do. Because doing that means having to not only feel the pain, but also see it. It means watching yourself crumble into ashes and dust with each step. But you don’t feel defeated. After hell or heaven or oblivion or wherever it is that the soul travels to once the body is put to rest, you don’t feel like you were ever weak. In fact, you feel indebted to pain, and to sadness.

Because it feels like if there is anything that was always there for you, it is pain.

***

Azora was… conflicted.

She was sprawled on the floor, her long brown hair falling on, and covering her face. She had her English notebook open in front of her, to a page where their teacher had originally made her write ‘I will complete my work in future’ five hundred times as a punishment. But what the page now had was nothing but meaningless streams of words and little sketches all over the distorted handwriting. In her hand was a blade. A blade that she had stumbled across on the sidewalk whilst walking home from school that afternoon. Her sister hadn’t noticed her slip it into her pocket.

But then it wasn’t like anybody ever cared.

She checked her watch with the cracked dial and worn, brown strap. It was eight pm. Four hours till midnight. Four hours till her life would come to an end, and she would drift away into nothingness forever. Azora sobbed. She clutched the blade and almost let it cut through her skin, but then hesitated. She let the pain seep in till her hand felt almost numb.

What was the poor girl’s life?

She lived in her tiny house with two other sisters, and her parents. Her father was an alcoholic who would try to hit her mother and sisters every night when he came back from work. He would spend all the savings on those bitter drinks in those wretched glass bottles. Azora had tried them once, when no one was home. She had tried them to see if they would turn her into a monster too. But they didn’t. And then she had sobbed because that meant that her father was characteristically bad, and that she would never get out of the madhouse she was living in. She had cursed the day she was born.

Her parents fought every night. Her sisters were hardly ever home. They were never bad to her, but all they ever said to her was ‘Don’t go downstairs. You’ll get hurt. There’s a monster downstairs.’ Azora never really understood what they meant, but she did as they told. She was scared of monsters. And many a times she had heard her sisters talk about her. She would hear them say that she was sick, and that they knew she would die by the end of the year. They called it a disease. They would add a funny looking white powder in her food that made it taste very lumpy and would make her feel sleepy right after eating it. They said that it was good for her, that it would make her okay. So she used to eat it, wordlessly, even though they never told her what was wrong with her, even when she asked.

Sometimes she would dream.

She would dream if nice things. She would dream of meadows with wildflowers and grass. She would dream of swimming in cool rivers on hot summer days. And sometimes she would dream of her grandmother’s stories. Her grandmother used to say that the ghosts come at midnight and take the souls away. And then one day, they took her away as well.

Azora would sit and imagine sometimes, if all these places existed where her grandmother was right now. She would ponder over how much better her family was, how much better her life was when her grandmother was alive. She spent time with Azora, and she felt loved, cared for, and wanted when she was around her. But then one stormy night she left too, and she took the happiness and the smile on Azora’s face along with her.

Everything had changed after that.

Azora brought her knees closer and hugged them under her chin as she sobbed, strands of her curly hair sticking to her cheek, the tears acting as an adhesive crafted by the sadness inside of her. She squeezed her hand and allowed the blade to cut open a bit of her skin. She heard an unintended sharp gasp from her own mouth as she turned to see a diminutive stream of red trickling down her palm, and felt a sudden rush of warmth horribly intertwined with pain. She curled into a ball and buried her head into her knees. No one loves me, she thought. Nobody will ever care. She was waiting for midnight to end her life, so that the good souls could come and take her away with them.

It was like a bomb was ticking inside her head. A bomb that was buried deep inside. With each second, it was getting closer to its breaking point, the point where it would blow. And there were just four hours left to save the world, to save her world. The world that would die with her the moment she would breathe her last breath. Azora was a young girl, naïve and afraid, who felt unloved and alone in spite of living in a house full of people. She had seen things and felt things eyes and hearts of girls so young should never see or feel, things no one should ever go through, and they had left her scarred.

Loosening her grip on the perilously sharp object in her hand, Azora began to think if anyone would miss her. Would anyone miss the young, pale, green-eyed twelve year old girl with curly brown hair who barely spoke a word in class? Would any of her teachers care that they’ll never see her again? She didn’t think her English teacher Miss Osborne would. She was the one who had given her the punishment when she didn’t finish the homework she was given to do. Miss Osborne will be happy to never see me again.

Would the girl she smiled at whilst she was coming home that afternoon ever find out that she was gone? Would her sisters remember her? Would they cry? She didn’t think her oldest sister Jenna would cry. Jenna never cried. She was a strong girl. Her other sister Elise though, Azora thought, would definitely cry. Elise was a crier. She cried for everything, all the time. Azora managed a weak, but genuine, passive smile. At least Elise would miss her.

Azora had only begun to ease out her position and turn to face the tiny broken window she was sitting by, when she heard her mother’s call for dinner. It was a bit louder than usual. That indicated that her father wasn’t home yet. She sniffled and straightened her legs. She wiped her injured palm with the underside of the end of her dress and wiped her face with her sleeve. She didn’t think anyone would notice.

With another sniffle, she made her way downstairs for the last meal of her life.

Nobody really spoke at the dinner table. Elise, with her rosy cheeks and huge black rimmed glasses gobbled down her dinner as quickly as possible so that she could get back to her side of the room she shared with Jenna, while Jenna herself was talking about something she read in the news with her mother. Azora ate silently, with the white powder making everything taste funny again, for the last time, Azora thought.

She went back upstairs after that. She was to go to sleep straight away in order to be able to wake up on time for school, but it didn’t matter. Azora spent pretty much of her time until midnight staring out of her window with the broken glass and feeling the wind blow, for the last time, she kept reminding herself.

And after what felt like forever, the last five minutes before midnight came trotting by. It was almost as if Azora could hear the Fates calling for her, and feel the souls waiting to take her.

With one shallow, trembling breath, Azora fumbled for the blade. She opened her palm and stared at the cut she had made a while ago. It’s going to hurt a lot, she thought. She stubbornly tried to blink away the tears that were threatening to break her all over again. She wanted to get over with it as soon as she could.

She checked her watch again. Three minutes. Azora felt another shaky breath escape her lips. She stiffened. I’ll miss being alive, she thought. She thought of every single person she loved and cared for, even if they didn’t care about her. Her mother, her sisters, even her father. She averted her eyes from her wrist as she positioned the blade. And just as it was going to touch the skin of her pale wrist, she felt a little flicker of light fall on her face.

Abruptly, Azora stopped.

She turned to the sloping ceiling of her attic-room. For a moment, she kept looking and nothing happened. And then she saw another tiny flicker on the wood. Azora eased her posture. She turned to gaze outside the window. A light was coming from the attic-room of the house that was opposite to hers. Azora felt a genuine smile tugging at her lips. Her eyes took a moment to adjust to the bright light. And as if on cue, the light subsided. Not completely, but enough for her to see the source, and the glorious one who had provided the source.

From her window, Azora could see her neighbour Liam, his face shining in the light of the lantern he was holding.

Liam was Azora’s friend. The only friend she had ever really had, the only friend who hadn’t stopped being her friend, in spite of her way of being. He had brown eyes, dirty-blond hair, and was only a few years older. He went to the same school as her, and lived across her house, and they knew each other since what felt like forever, even though they had never spoken a word to each other. Sometimes they would talk though signs from their windows, and laugh at each other’s expressions.

His life wasn’t a walk in the park either. Liam had a malfunctioning kidney, because of which he had to take a lot of medications and go through a lot of pain. Apparently, it was pretty severe. His mother had half a year ago. He knew what it was like to not want to live. He knew what it was like to have to cry yourself to sleep. And even though Azora wasn’t sure if he was aware of her health condition, (since she herself didn’t have a clue), but something told her that he knew what was going on.

That mid-September night, something told her that he knew, and that if no one else did, he cared.

‘Are you okay?’ Liam asked her from the window by making gestures with his hands.

Azora waved at him, and as she did, she felt the blade slip out of her hand, and tumble down the window pane to the ground. She looked down at the silver instrument capable of killing. She chuckled at how it was back to where she had first found it. The ground.

‘I saw you crying,’ he said, making signs with his hands again.

Azora’s heart skipped a beat. She hadn’t really wanted anyone noticing, ‘I’m fine’ she signed to him by giving him a thumbs up.

Liam nodded an Okay.

They smiled at each other. ‘Don’t cry,’ he signed to her.

She nodded, and before closing the window and going to bed, as tears welled up in her large green eyes, she signed him a Thank You.

Somebody cares, Azora thought to herself. She couldn’t believe that only a while ago she was about to take her own life. She thanked God for sending the light of Liam’s lantern into her room to break her from her trance. She checked her watch. It was 12:06 am of the next day. She wiped her eyes rather happily, and got into her tiny bed. Somebody cares, she thought to herself again, before she closed her eyes to sleep.

Liam, on the other side of the street, was honestly still a bit perplexed. He was about to ask Azora what exactly she was thanking him for, but he was too late. She had already left. Little did he know, that just by swinging his ancient, rusty lantern, and asking the young girl he lived across if she was doing okay, he had diffused a bomb that was about to explode any moment.

Little did he know that he had saved a world.