Night Owl

After being forced to sit through a meal of forced cheer, as my family attempt to draw me out of the shell her death hardened around me, I am relieved to escape to the privacy of my room. As I enter my haven I take in the clutter, it probably needs tidying...but I kind of like it, the mess of things feel familiar and comforting. In a flash of orange my eyesight and mind are diverted to the small tank on my bedside table where my goldfish, Jaws, lives.

I know what’s coming next; I’ve travelled this road enough...every day in fact. It takes me exactly a hundred and eleven minutes to share the journey from meeting Ally to losing her with Jaws. I know. I’ve counted. I hadn’t known Ally all that long, well five years, but it feels like a mere blink of time. When I met her we were 12, I was awkward and lonely just starting high school in a body that didn’t feel quite like mine yet and she was, full of a confidence I’ve never had. Ally was the one who stood up to anyone who upset me, in ninth grade she was the girl who punched Elizabeth Lester in the nose when she called me a freak who no one liked. In the time I knew her she became my protector, my big sister in so many ways, I knew she’d been sick before but she was so strong, so full of life I never thought I’d really have to lose her. Ally had been free of the leukaemia since she was 10, the oncologists and others in the parade of doctors had said that ten years was the mark to aim for, the point at which we’d know she was free. It had been seven years...surely that was long enough, it seems like a joke now, and seven years aren’t ten. What a fool I was to believe it.

Suddenly I can’t bear it anymore, can’t sit here watching her last weeks in my mind- again. I grab my car keys and backpack of school things and head for the door.