Paralyzed

• Farai Meck, Grade 7
• Short Story
• 2019

Do you remember the very first time you made me feel worthless? Oh, you don’t? Well in that case let me remind you. I was seven, you’d asked me to put something away, but I misheard you and put it in the wrong place. You called me stupid and some other words I didn’t understand. That night I forgot about the incident and continued to play with my toys. Day by day you would continue to get mad at me for the smallest things and call me worthless and stupid. Day by day I began to believe you more and more. By the time I was ten, I was in a bad state of mind. Everyday the first thing I’d think to myself was “Why am I still here?”. Often, I convinced myself that it was all just a bad dream, but I knew I was lying to myself. Three years later I was thirteen, the first year of my teenage years. I thought things would change, boy was I wrong. I had big expectations: good grades, always happy…perfect. I felt suffocated, like the world was slowly closing in on me. I became less sane, although on the outside I seemed normal my mind was racing with dark thoughts. “What if you just end it?”, “Get the knife…you know the drill.”, “You’re, just contaminating the world. It doesn’t need garbage like you.” Before I knew it, I was seventeen, I only had one more year to go then I’d finally be able to run away from all this pain and misery. Run and never look back. Maybe even finally I’d find happiness within this endless black void I was falling into. I began to go with whatever my mind was telling me, we’d become one. I kept up my good grades, did whatever I was told, never spoke back and coped with everything that made me die a little more on the inside. I had no voice. It was finally 2024 and I was graduating. For the first time in my life I felt relief. The day before graduation I got a text from a classmate. He said he wanted to meet up, I didn’t think it was a good idea, but I would’ve done anything to be away from home. We started seeing each other more after that, it felt as though he was the only person who understood me. On my nineteenth birthday he said he wanted to give me something he knew I always wanted. I went to his house. He showed me two bottles of Morphine. He said that together we could go to the after life and be happy. I’d always wanted to be happy so together we injected Morphine into our veins. Together we died paralyzed. Now do you remember mother? Do you remember how much pain you put me through? How you suffocated me until I went insane? How does it feel to not be a mother anymore? Are you finally happy?