Let Go

• Gloria Cho, Grade 9
• Short Story
• 2008

Have you ever cried so much that your throat dried up with roughness prickling the inside of your mouth? That whenever you attempted to speak all that came out was a rough croak? Have you ever cried so much that your eyes only saw the world as an incoherent image?
Well, I have.
I’ve cried so much that when my friends visited me they would look at me horrifically. I was in a state of dilapidation.
One moment my life was perfect. Then suddenly my life tumbled down on me, making me fall to the ground, with nothing to grasp onto to drag me back on my feet. I was a calamity and no one could assist me because the soul that was once inside of me perished. The bright colours that made up my soul evanesced. My heart lost its pulse and the happiness inside of me was sucked out by all the despair I suffered through.
I don’t clarify myself as a human anymore. I’m practically dead, a ghost. Who can be called a human when they consist of no soul?
I have skin paler than a white sheet of paper. My eyes are corpulent with red veins perilously constraining to burst out. I have dark, grotesques, circles of bags underneath my eyes. My lips are poised in a thin line with desiccated skins veneering the once kissable lips.
I looked sickening and smelt revolting but my emotions were worse. The shattered, despondency, anguished and annihilated heart of mine was nothing compared to my appearance.
All the happy memories that have completed me have been effaced and overlapped by the traumatized memory of my mother’s death. That same devastating scene perpetually played in my mind.
My mother left me in a deep and interminable dip where there was no egress. I contemplated about leaving the world but that would make me the same as my mother and I didn’t want to be her. I want to be someone that stood on their two foot, smiling and beaming no matter how hard life was. I was going to be strong and powerfully spiritual, so whenever life was hard, I’ll haul myself off the ground and continue fulfilling my dreams.
I wasn’t going to live in a life full of darkness because of the choice my mother made. My mother committed suicide and I secretly witnessed it, but eventually I let it go. Through my mother’s death, I learnt how to be strong.
Have you ever tried to kill yourself but noticed that the people that loved you were going to suffer?
Have you ever lifted yourself off the ground, striding yourself out of the melancholy life you suffered?
Well, I have.
I never thought that I would be able to drag myself from the miserable life I was living but guess what? I did it and you know what? I continued living and never gave up and now I’m living my life with pure happiness filling my soul.