Immortal

I have lived in this world for only seventeen years and in that short time, I’ve come to know true love and true loss. When I was fifteen my mom and dad decided that the love they shared had come to an end and this led to them getting a divorce. My best interest was never factored into their decision, but I suppose that made sense if only a little. It wasn’t my relationship, so if I look at it from a logical standpoint, my opinion truly never mattered. Although, my adolescent brain couldn’t quite grasp how they could do this without talking to me about it or even giving me a heads-up. Did my opinion really not matter? Did they even care what this might do to me? I remember crying in my room for weeks, desperately trying to grasp onto something that would take the pain away. In such a desperate state of mind, I became self-destructive using any form of coping method that I could find. Although I’ve outgrown most of these nasty habits and learned new and healthier ways of coping I’m unfortunately left with the scars, both mental and physical. With the split, my dad decided to move back to his hometown in Virginia where he and I would live for some time. I was always closer with my dad, I loved both of my parents but there was some unexplainable bond that my dad and I shared. And even if that bond didn’t exist, hearing the awful things my mother would say to him while they argued made me grow a hatred for my mother. Over time that feeling of anger and betrayal has subsided but make no mistake, I haven’t forgiven her whatsoever.

The second tragedy in my life came only two short years after we left Massachusetts to go back to my father’s hometown. On what I can rightfully say was the worst day of my life, my father Henry would lose his life. The news was brought to me by the Spotsylvania county sheriff’s department early in the morning. I can still hear the loud knocking on the door like it happened yesterday, it woke me out of my sleep and I couldn’t have imagined the news I was about to recieve. An officer named Allen Chandler was the man who told me that my father was murdered late the previous night in some sort of altercation. The investigation was ongoing so I wasn’t able to hear any information about what had happened, I was even taken in for questioning myself. Because it was only me and my dad, I had to stay with my grandmother on my dad’s side since she lived nearby. I was told not to leave Virginia until the investigation was over but I wasn’t told how long it would be, though I’d find out soon enough. It only took three short months for them to give up on finding his killer. I was furious when I had to hear the people tasked with bringing a killer to justice, tell me that there was nothing more they could do. I later found out that he was killed by some kind of sharp object that ripped through his neck causing him to bleed out. I stayed up night after night theorizing what could have happened or who could have done this to him... but there was nothing. After seeing the details of what occurred on paper and then having to see my father’s lifeless body in the morgue, I didn’t blame them for giving up. The next week after his death was the hardest, mentally and physically, it took every ounce of strength I had not to fall into the same destructive patterns that I was used to. And to top it all off, the genuine icing on the cake, I had to make the grueling journey back to Massachusetts to live with my mother again. From the divorce to losing the beautiful image of my mother, to watching my dad be killed by someone who is still out in the world, who’s still free caused me to become jaded, if I were to feel anymore I think that it would cause me to implode.

Before leaving I got a visit from Robert Gilden, my father’s lawyer whom I knew quite well, he sat me down and began telling me that my father had a will written in case of his untimely demise. This information shocked me, my dad was never one to be paranoid about dying, and even more than that, who writes their will at forty? In it, he left me only two things, his two most valuable items that he owned. These were not valuable in the monetary sense but rich in sentiment. His old Mustang that we drove in thousands of times, the midnight rides through the countryside and the hot summer days with the windows rolled down and the music blasting. The other item was a ring that I had never seen him take off in my seventeen years on this earth. Even in death, he had it attached to his middle finger. In his will, he explicitly stated that this ring goes to me and no one else. I slid the ring on my own middle finger and it almost made me tear up, this one small thing felt so huge and I was grateful that I was able to inherit it. As for the car, I didn’t want to drive from Virginia to Massachusetts so my mother hired a company to ship it to her house. For me, I would have to board a flight the next day and leave behind everything that had become normal to me. In Virginia, I made sure to refrain from making friends or any sort of deep personal connections that would make leaving harder than it had to be. When I abruptly left my home in Massachusetts after my parent’s divorce, one of the hardest things I had to do was tell the amazing friends that I’d made over the years that I was leaving. And even harder than that was having to end things with my girlfriend at the time, thankfully we were young and she would have plenty of time to find someone that would treat her better than I ever could have. Seeing them again was something I wished I’d never have to do, but thanks to the circumstances it seems that my simple life would once again be turned on its head. I hope that it doesn’t kill me too.