Kate Didd

One day I woke up and died. Not the kind of death that steals your breath or folds your body into the earth, no, this one came softly. It sat at the edge of my bed and whispered that everything I had once been was gone. I opened my eyes and felt the weight of it, the silence in the room, the still air clinging to the curtains like grief that refused to move on.

I picked myself up anyway. My legs remembered what my heart had forgotten, motion. I walked the narrow halls of my own life, trailing my fingers along the wallpaper as if touching the veins of an old house that had once loved me. The rooms were the same, but something had been scraped out of them , the laughter, the warmth, the heartbeat of belonging.

I called out for someone. For anyone. But all I heard was the echo of my own voice folding back into me.

I begged my father. I said, “Love me, please.” But he turned and walked away, just as he had done every time before, his footsteps leaving the scent of abandonment behind.

So I went to the uncles, the ones who should have known how to hold the broken pieces of a girl who was never protected. I stood before them and said, “I’m here. Please, take me.” And they, too, looked away.

My brothers had grown taller than me, broader now, men in every sense except the one that mattered. I thought maybe they could lift me out of the wreckage. But they couldn’t. Their eyes carried the same emptiness, that inherited silence that passes down like a curse.

And when I finally turned to my husband, when I whispered through the trembling that I needed him to show up for me, he said softly, “I just can’t.”

That was the moment the death inside me became complete, the kind of death that teaches you the living won’t always save you, even when they could.

So I stood there in the dim light of morning, surrounded by ghosts with beating hearts, and I decided that if no one was coming to resurrect me, I would have to raise myself.