It was a surprisingly ordinary day. It was one where I wore my purple low top, canvas sneakers covered in paint stains with an interior that molded right to my foot. The speakers in every homeroom blasted an announcement about a sophomore class meeting and I followed the mass of students as if it was just another assembly. But it wasn’t, not after the principal said it. Five simple words.
Madison committed suicide last night.
And like that a wave of horrified silence washed across the entire audience and chairs toppled over. I saw blurring figures in my peripheral vision run for the door in their colored boots and their flexible flip flops. Their basketball sneakers and shaky high heels running from the truth as I curled my toes in my comfortable shoes trying to get a grip on reality. My breathing was soft and I involuntary felt my body curl in to hold in my own sorrows.
I heard there was support. I heard wails. But most prominent was the sound of the soles of my mulberry sneakers cracking over the worn down carpet of that theater room fleeing. I filed back out into a mass of brightly clothed students with a misty gray contagion above their heads that bent their shoulders in and set their eyes downcast.
It was then, as I rushed forward to class, that I realized why every person who came out of the auditorium was slouching. Death was heavy upon us. None of us could run far in our most comfortable shoes whether they were combat boots or track team sneakers. Death was an entity that pressed down on our heels clipping our ankles and filling our heads to the brim with a hazy fog driving us into the ground. It’s a disease of black grief that sets into our skin from the mere whisper of its victim and it doesn’t leave until rode out. It could last minutes, days, even years. This disease moves like an infection crawling like sludge through our veins leaving sluggishness in its wake, festering in the left cavity of our chest. Breaking down and breaking through.
This disease. We couldn’t cry it out; tears would run dry too fast. We couldn’t throw it up; all that comes out was choked cries and lost words of broken promises. We couldn’t bleed it out; all we would become was another catalyst of the disease ourselves. For more people, more infected.
And as I walked those hallways of my school that infection of death was all I thought of until the day I waited outside that white mansion upon a hill in a line. Hand wrapped around my father's, letting white streaks spring angrily across my hand, feet shifting inside my purple sneakers. The line was for miles, this girl we all stood for. Seconds. Minutes. Hours, I held my composure like a criminal before a jury until I reached the outside of that white mansion. Inside it glowed with warm light as if I had entered Heaven. Flowers of every color surrounded me, a garden of hope. But the pictures that were everywhere made me swallow. Her face everywhere bombarding that embittering disease I held within me. (continued)
You Can't Run From Disease
By: Amanda Doherty