Chapter 2
These days, Melinda meditates.
She wakes up, meditates, eats breakfast, exercises, eats lunch, exercises, eats dinner, and meditates.
Then she sleeps.
(It’s a relief every night, sleep, because she can almost fool herself that she doesn’t have to wake up.)
As she sleeps, she dreams of nothing, only an empty black abyss, of which she never stops falling. (She'd call it a nightmare if this darkness wasn’t her reality.)
When she wakes, the thoughts weigh her down, and so again, Melinda meditates. She closes her eyes, breathes, pretends nothing exists. Her mind quiets and she relishes in the feeling, doesn’t stop until Phil knocks on the door, gives her food, and asks his daily question:
“You up for a walk today?”
Everyday, Melinda says no.
(She doesn’t leave her room anymore.)
Those days, are the good days, where she thinks of nothing, feels nothing, and she convinces herself that she is nothing.
The bad days look no different, to an outside perspective.
(No one is watching but she hides her emotions anyway, as if maybe that way they’ll disappear.)
The bad days, Melinda wakes up, and meditates. She closes her eyes, breathes, pretends nothing exists. And nothing does, except the sound of her voice, begging, crying, broken.
“Can you stay with me? Please?”
Of course, Melinda says. Nothing else, because there is nothing more to be said, nothing else, because there is nothing more to be done.
(And nothing else, because her heart has broken, and nothing is all that was left.)
On the bad days, Melinda meditates, but even that isn’t enough to stop the growing pain in her soul. She’s not sad, even so.
(Sad: a little three letter word to describe a feeling of sorrow. Almost comical, she thinks, that such a word could possibly hope to depict the way she feels inside.)
Melinda is broken, Melinda is numb, Melinda is nothing.
And instead of where her heart is supposed to be, there is a great ball of agony, and it doesn’t hurt, because Melinda doesn’t let herself feel anymore.
(She thinks, sometimes, that if she did, sleeping would no longer be enough of an escape.)
“May! May, please, I don’t- I don’t want to die.”
I know, Melinda says, because there was a time where Daisy Johnson used to be so full of life, there was a time where she was happy.
(I know, she says, because a part of her is dying too.)
“I don’t want to go alone. Don’t leave me, please.”
Melinda says nothing, because the line is cut, her heart is broken, and her daughter is dead.
She thinks of Bahrain, sometimes, when she can’t stop her brain from wandering.
She thinks of that girl, and wonders if her mother had to feel like this, if her mother had to learn to live feeling like absolutely nothing.
“Mom, I don’t want to go alone.”
Melinda keeps meditating.